Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916

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Utah State University
DigitalCommons@USU
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies, School of
1-1-1992
Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the
Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah,
1860-1916
Kathryn T. Morse
Utah State University
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Recommended Citation
Morse, Kathryn T., "Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916" (1992).
All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1248.
htp://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1248
Copyright: Kathryn Taylor Morse 1992
All Rights Reserved
NATURE'S SECOND COURSE: WATER CULTURE
IN THE MORMON COMMUNITIES OF
CACHE VALLEY, UTAH, 1860-1916
by
Kathryn T. Morse
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Approved:
Hakr 'Profess'or
Committee Member
of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
Committee H~ber
Dean of Graduate studies
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY
Logan, Utah
1992
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Everyone who contributed to this project displayed
impressive tact, patience, and good humor in awaiting its
belated completion. Thanks go to Prof. Chas Peterson, who
introduced me to the study of Mormon community, helped to
define, and then re-define the topic, and provided a
crucial reading of the first draft. Prof. Carol O'Connor
assisted with my struggles to re-define the topic as well.
Prof. Clyde Milner not only gave the thesis its title, but
also provided skillful advice and encouragement at all
stages. In the context of another project, Prof. Len
Rosenband helped me grapple with 19th-century Mormon
diaries, a skill which proved crucial to this thesis.
Prof. Tom Lyon served on my thesis committee and helped
with a careful reading of the first draft. Carolyn
Fullmer and everyone at the Utah State History Department
helped with the final details. Prof. Bill Cronon of Yale
University chipped in a long conversation on various
aspects of the thesis topic on the bus ride from Tacoma to
Mt. Rainier and back at the 1989 WHA conference. My
formal intellectual debts to Prof. Cronon are evident in
the text. Profs. Richard White and John Findlay of the
University of Washington kindly and tactfully encouraged
me to finish this project, and supported my efforts to do
so long distance. I am grateful to all.
iii
A. J. Simmonds, Brad Cole, and the staff of Special
Collections at the Merrill Library graciously allowed me
free run of their collections and helped me locate
important documents, for which I thank them. All of the
documents in this work come from their impressive archive,
and my work would have been impossible without their
support. utah state University provided financial
assistance for my studies through its support of the
Western History Association editorial fellowship program,
a seeley-Hinckley scholarship in 1989, and through a
summer thesis completion scholarship in 1990.
All of my friends in Logan, including Prof. Anne
Butler, Jay Butler, Lisa Godfrey, L. J. Godfrey, Catherine
Milner, Charlie Milner, Clyde Milner, Chris Mitchell,
Carol O'Connor, Grace ott, Ross Peterson, Jane Reilly,
Renee Sentilles, Ona Siporin, and Barbara stewart provided
advice, support, and love throughout this project, as well
as recreational diversions and plenty of free meals. I
thank them all. I am grateful to my parents, steve and
Deanne Morse, and my housemates, Jerri Hoskyn and Cindy
Cresap, for day-to-day and week-to-week encouragement.
My personal connection to the stretch of Cache Valley
watered by the irrigation systems discussed here grows out
of hikes and bike rides around the valley, and from bike
rides from my various homes in Logan to the various homes
iv
of my good friends Lisa and L.J. Godfrey in North Logan
and Smithfield. It was in passing through that irrigated,
beautiful landscape, in all seasons, at all hours, to join
them for barbecues and movie-fests, that I first grasped
the powerful sense of place that Mormon communities
created in Cache Valley through the practice of irrigated
agriculture. I thank Lisa and L. J. for sharing that
place with me.
Kathryn Morse
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
~ClCllO~EI)(;~ENT~ •..•••...•••.•...••.•••••••••........•.. ii
LIST OF FIG'URES •...•.•••.......•.•.••....••••..•••...... vi
ABSTRACT ..............•.....•••••••..••••...•••....••.. vii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ....••.•••.••••...•••••...•.•....•..... 1
II. NAT'URE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH ••.•••• · •.••.•.•.... 13
III. FROM LO(;AN RIVER TO LO(;AN TOWN ••••••••.••••.....•. 33
IV. (;ETTIN(; WATER: COMMUNITY SYST~S OF EXCHAN(;E •...• 76
V. WATER AND POWER: PATRIARCHY, (;EO(;RAPHY, AND
HIERARCHIES OF WATER USE •.•••••••••••.••••...••... 99
VI. STRIKIN(; A BALANCE: NAT'URAL AND CULTURAL CYCLES
OF WATER USE IN MORMON COMMUNITIES •••••••••..••.. 131
VII. WATER IN THE STREETS: VILLA(;E LOT IRRI(;ATION .••. 174
VIII. CONCLUSION .•.•••.•••••••••••••..•••••......•..... 209
BIBLIO(;RAPHY •••••••...•••..••••••••••••••••••••••••.•.. 218
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-
Idaho .......................................... 5
2 Cache Valley Basin with Inset ................... 41
2A Inset of Map 2. Logan River Canals .............. 42
3 Land Ownership Along Logan and Richmond Canal .. l04
4 Call Decree Chart .............................. 166
5 Logan River water Distribution Schedules .... 169-71
6 Logan City with Boundaries of Seventh Ward ..... 186
7 Detail of Seventh Ward, with Inset ............. 195
8 city Lot Arrangements in Salt Lake City ........ 201
ABSTRACT
Nature's Second Course: water Culture
in the Mormon Communities of
Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916
by
Kathryn T. Morse, Master of Arts
Utah State University, 1992
Major Professor: Dr. Clyde A. Milner II
Department: History
vii
.Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a
unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism
and a strong sense of community. They encountered a
specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A
distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and
practices developed out of the complex interchanges
between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between
1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts
over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the
fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between
individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected
the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture.
The season-to-season workings of irrigation
institutions that distributed water from the Logan River,
whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal
viii
cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed
systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual
irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount
of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's
collective construction and upkeep of canals. The
democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were
tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography
of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A
small group of elite town fathers held most of the
responsibility for irrigation administration, and used
their influence -in disputes over water. Those town
fathers also tended to own more land than other
irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity
to the canals themselves.
Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in
1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate
a water distribution system that allowed for both the
growth of local communities and for continued adherence to
the basic religious principles on which the communities
were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal
cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of
the rise and fall of the water level in the river.
Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city
block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems
constituted an interesting example of the ways in which
ix
culture and the environment come together to shape natural
resource use, especially in the arid regions of the
American west.
(234 pages)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
"I had my garden spot surveyed this day[.] Agnes was
very sick."l So wrote Mormon settler and diarist John
Borrowman on Tuesday, May 28, 1850. As of that date,
Borrowman, a Scottish immigrant, had lived in Salt Lake
City for just over a year and a half, and had been married
for sixteen months. Given the crushing load of labor
involved in establishing a home, clearing, fencing,
plowing, and watering his land, and contributing to
community projects, it is no wonder that Borrowman kept
his . journal entries short. His brief words revealed much
about his world, however. They spoke particularly to the
crucial place of irrigation water in that world.
Borrowman summed up the following day with equal brevity:
"I watered my land this morning[i] William Park was born
at a quarter to three 0' clock in the morning. ,,2 The order
of his comments is telling. Though his wife had been in
labor the previous day and most of the night, and had
given birth to his first child, William Park Borrowman,
I John Borrowman Journal, Extracts 1846-1860, 28 May
1850, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions,
vol. 3, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT.
2 Borrowman Journal, 29 May 1850.
early that morning, he noted first that he had irrigated
his farmland.
2
John Borrowman's conflation of those two events, the
birth of his son and the watering of his land, spoke to
the importance of irrigation water in his family's life,
and in the life of early Mormon communities in utah. Not
only did the watering of land merit frequent mention in
daily records of individual and collective activities, but
any work involving water and water ditches got top billing
over young William Borrowman's tersely heralded arrival.
The contrasting of these two events in a simple record of
a single day pointed as· well to the complementary nature
of the two acts. In bringing a child into the world of
Salt Lake city in 1850, and in bringing water to their
newly acquired farm plot, John and Agnes Borrowman took
two closely linked steps toward the fulfillment of their
earthly mission. That mission was to create a Mormon
civilization in the valleys at the foot of the Wasatch
Mountains. They had to people what seemed an endless
wilderness with like-minded servants of God, and they had
to support their families with the resources that God had
provided them in this new Zion.
To give the watering of land and a birth equal
weight, then, was no outlandish literary act. Water held
a crucial place in the Mormon physical and spiritual
3
world. It symbolized the baptism of new members into the
spiritual community, and it made food production possible.
Folklorist Barre Toelken, in his work on the folklore of
water in Mormon Utah, notes that as in the irrigation of
an arid land, "so in baptism is water a mediator between
life and death, a concept richly dramatized in many Mormon
legends. "3
water held great meaning and power in 19th- and early
20th-century Mormon communities, as it does in the
present. The structure of water flow in those communities
reflected the fundamental tensions between individual gain
and collective progress, both spiritual and material, that
underlay Mormon culture. It reflected as well the
patriarchal essence of that culture. Those two components
of the Mormon world, the constant struggle for balance
between the individual and the community, and the rule of
the fathers, in family, community, and religion, were as
evident in the social mechanisms of water use as in any
other aspect of community life.
The management of irrigation water by local canal
companies provided a forum for expressions of the purpose
and meaning of Mormon community, and of the place of that
community in both the physical environment and the
3 Barre Toelken, "The Folklore of water in the Mormon
West'," Northwest Folklore 7 (Spring 1989): 10.
4
spiritual universe. w~ter and its management were crucial
not only to the material survival and prosperity of the
town, but also to the residents' understanding of their
individual and collective roles in the fulfillment of the
Mormon mission. This thesis will explore the connections
between water, religion, community, and nature along the
Logan River in Cache Valley, Utah, from settlement in 1860
through the 1916 community-wide adjudication of water
rights [see Figure 1]. The events of those years are
informed by both earlier and later stages of Mormon
settlement, as evident in John Borrowman's journal, and
thus I consider examples of water use from widely varying
moments of Utah's settlement. Though the management and
infrastructure of water use changed over this 1860-1916
time-span, and continued to change thereafter, the Logan
irrigators' tenacious commitment to traditional practices
and institutions during this period indicated the cultural
importance of a uniquely Mormon way of distributing water.
In claiming that water held "cultural importance" in
Mormon Utah, that water use was itself "cultural," I seek
more than historical proof of the obvious. I investigate
rather the detailed and subtle ways in which culture--the
ever-shifting mixture of religious belief, social and
economic structure, material subsistence, family and
community life, divisions of labor, written and oral
....
'1
\A q, ~~
Figure 1. Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho,
from The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho,
ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956).
~.
01
6
traditions, and worldview--shaped the use of natural
resources. All natural resource use is cultural, but the
connections between nature and culture, and the ways in
which culture mediates between human communities and the
natural environment, vary widely, even within a single
region or state. A detailed consideration of these
connections from a cultural standpoint, as a case study of
the interactions between nature and culture, is justified
by the unique world of Mormon water use.
Over the last few decades, growing numbers of
historians have turned their attention to the place of
water in the American West, and in the Mormon West as
well. 4 Donald Worster's 1985 book, Rivers of Empire:
water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, is
perhaps the most provocative of these recent works. It is
4 The list is extensive, but includes: Robert G.
Dunbar, Forging New Rights in Western Waters
(Lincoln, 1983); Norris Hundley, jr., Water and the
West: The Colorado River and the Politics of Water
in the West (Berkeley, 1975); William L. Kahrl, Water
and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles' Water
Sqpply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley, 1982); Arthur
Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ..• and the Desert
Shall .Rejoice: Conflict, Growth, and Justice in Arid
Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Donald J. Pisani,
From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation
Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931
(Berkeley, 1984); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The
American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York,
1986); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid
America (New York, 1900); and Donald Worster, Rivers
of Empire; water, Aridity & The Growth of The
American West (New York, 1985).
in part a moral condemnation of the destruction that the
hydraulic society of the modern West has visited upon
rivers that were once natural systems, and upon
communities that once felt some connection to those
rivers. Worster defines three modes of societal water
control: the local SUbsistence mode; the agrarian state
mode; and the one currently operating in most western
communities, the capitalist state mode. s Worster
characterizes the early Mormon SUbsistence mode as an
admirable monument to religious zeal, as an example of a
7
good fit between ideology and environment, and as evidence
of an underlying, dictatorial church hierarchy. Mormon
water systems were certainly all of those things, but they
were much more as well. Worster only skims the surface of
what is to be learned from a close examination of the
local SUbsistence mode of water control in utah. This is
not surprising, as neither utah nor SUbsistence water use
are his main topic in Rivers of Empire. His discussion of
the capitalist state mode of water development, however,
by providing a contrast to local SUbsistence water
systems, underlines much that is important about water in
Mormon communities.
The West's hydraulic society, according to Worster,
S Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water. Aridity &
The Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 31.
8
is built on "a sharply alienating, intensely managerial
relationship with nature. ,,6 That relationship with nature
is evident in the infrastructure of dams, canals, and
aqueducts, monolithic concrete fortresses which proclaim
humankind's domination of, and separation from, the
natural resources that support their consumer-oriented,
socially divided culture. Water in these canals and
behind these dams is not part of a natural system, but
rather, in Worster's words, "simplified, abstracted water,
rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to
raise food, fill pipes, and make money.,,7 In evoking the
profound alienation he perceives between the human
community and water, Worster describes the Friant-Kern
Canal, which waters the agribusiness empire of
California's Central Valley:
Along the Friant-Kern Canal, as along many others
like it, tall chain-link fences run on either side,
sealing the ditch off from stray dogs, children,
fishermen (there are no fish anyway), solitary
thinkers, lovers, swimmers, loping hungry coyotes,
migrating turtles, indeed from all of nature and
human life ..•• 8
At its core, then, Rivers of Empire asserts that the
way in which any community in an arid environment controls
its distribution of water reflects its social and
6 Worster, Rivers' of Empire,S.
7 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S.
8 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S.
9
political structure, and the fundamental tenets of its
attitudes toward nature. In Worster's words, "the social
order, the shape of western community ••• is reflected in
the waters of the ditch. ,,9 That assertion, and those
reflections, are nowhere more evident than in the Logan
River communities of Cache Valley between 1860 and 1916.
The following chapters will explore the social order
reflected in the workings of village ditches, first from
the wide-angled perspective of the Mormon spiritual world­view,
then from the nearer vantage of the season-to-season
workings of two major canal companies, and finally from a
close-up look at water use on village house lots and in
gardens.
While Mormon water use was a thoroughly cultural
activity, it involved nature as well. The development of
irrigation institutions and distributions systems that met
the agricultural demands of the villages involved a
constant struggle to fit those demands into the limits of
the water supplied by the Logan River. The Euro-American
settlers who first diverted the waters of the Logan River
alienated and abstracted that river from its "first" or
original "state of nature," just as other westerners
wrought havoc on the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia,
and Colorado.
9 Worster, River of Empire, 5.
10
Cache Valley Mormons also "commoditized" irrigation
water, bringing it within a system of economic exchange
that defined and re-defined its value by different, and
changing, criteria. The Utahns turned the river into
networks of canals, and attempted to alter the annual
cycles of natural water flow to match the cycles of
agricultural demand and community water use. In Logan,
Utah, however, this creation of a "second" nature, a
second cycle of water flow, took place on a much less
disruptive scale than elsewhere in the west. Mormon
culture and the Cache Valley environment were different
from other western cultures and places. The Mormon system
of re-distributing river flow across time and space was
thus distinctive. water in small Mormon communities was
not "rigidly separated" from the human communities through
which it ran by artificial cycles of dam-released flow, by
steel and concrete, or by intellectual constructs of water
as commodity or as capital. The system of exchange worked
out by Logan water users--what and when they traded
amongst themselves for water--proved less rigid, less
cash-based, less technologically complex, than those of
other, and later, western communities. Mormons certainly
foisted intellectual constructs onto their water supply,
and certainly altered its cycles of flow, but they were
constructs and cycles of a different kind, based on their
11
drive for material success within the boundaries of
community tenets. Far from alienating water from its own
"nature" or from human society, Mormon settlers welcomed
irrigation water into their communities, where it flowed
in open streams down ditches and gutters, through yards
and parks, providing long corridors of green vegetation,
and lofting islands of cool air into the summer heat. The
Latter-day saints filled their towns with the sound of
running water.
water, at least in some utah communities, had a
meaning far different from that of water in other parts of
the American west. This much is clear in the contrast
between village canals and the hydraulic nightmare Worster
describes in California. Where Rivers of Empire tells the
story of Big Twentieth-Century Water, this thesis examines
a smaller, more obscure and out-of-the-way genre of
western water history, one of small communities using a
small river to small ends. Water formed crucial, dynamic
connections between members of those communities, and
between the community and the natural environment. Those
connections to water grew out of the unique culture that
the Latter-day Saints developed in reaction to a specific
western environment. Water joined them to nature and to
each other in ways which evidenced not a timeless harmony
between "man" and "nature," but rather the disjunctions
12
and tensions inherent in every attempt to shape nature to
human designs, as well as the tensions within human
communities created by such shapings. This discussion of
Mormon water-use, then, is at its base a cultural study,
an attempt to sketch the ways in which culture is both
shaped by and reflected in the use of natural resources,
and the ways in which culture can in turn influence social
decisions concerning nature as a resource.
13
CHAPTER II
NATURE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH
In the villages of Cache Valley, Utah, water was part
both of a natural system--the river--and a social,
religious, and even spiritual system--Mormon culture.
That culture combined elements of Jeffersonian agrarianism
with a peculiar brand of millennial fervor. To find the
place of water in this spiritual universe, one must follow
its flow into and out of Mormon agrarianism.
As the vanguard of Euro-American settlement in the
Great Basin, the Utah migrants of the 1840s, '50s, and
'60s brought with them the basic tenets of the American
agrarian myth. Like other Americans, they held that the
Biblical injunction to "replenish the earth, and subdue
it" could best be fulfilled though agriculture. Through
farming, God's true servants could remake the New World
into a second garden of Eden. In his late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century writings, Thomas Jefferson
combined Biblical agrarianism with the Enlightenment­inspired
conviction that only the yeoman farmer, dependent
solely on the soil and his own initiative, could properly
participate in a democratic society. Jefferson wrote that
"[t]hose who labor in the earth are the chosen people of
14
God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has
made His peculiar deposit for sUbstantial and genuine
v1. rt ue .... ,,1
This agrarian myth prevailed throughout America in
the 19th century. It had particular power in regard to
the American West, as established by Henry Nash smith in
his classic work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth. smith expanded Jefferson's general agrarian
myth to include the "myth of the garden," the idea that
the transformation of the continent should result in a
settled pastoral landscape. "The master symbol of the
garden," smith wrote, "embraced a cluster of metaphors
expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor
in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the
idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian
weapon, the sacred plow. ,,2 The Latter-day saints adhered
to this garden-myth with a tenacity unmatched by any other
group of Euro-American settlers. 3 They focused on the
canonization and fulfillment of agriculture ideals with
1 As quoted in Donald Henriques Dyal, "The Agrarian
Values of Mormonism: A Touch of the Mountain Sod"
(Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1980), 3.
2 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West
as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 123.
3 See Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 136,
on the Mormon affinity for the "controlling images"
of the agrarian myth.
unprecedented energy. Generic American agrarianism
deteriorated into a fuzzy secularity as the 19th century
progressed, but Utah Mormons harnessed the fervor of
puritanism, and of 1840s revivalism, to propel agrarian
beliefs to new heights of piety. Historian Charles S.
15
Peterson described Mormon agrarian belief as "[c]osmic in
its breadth," a conviction that:
Man and the world in which he lived were in a wicked
and ungodly state. The redemption of the righteous
was the first imperative and implied the second, the
redemption of the earth. 4
Brigham Young, who led the Mormon migration to Utah,
with his fellow Mormon leaders incorporated this version
of Christian agrarianism into scriptural texts. Their
writings reveal an intensely practical agrarian faith,
according to which human beings sought not to improve
themselves for a non-earthly afterlife, but rather to
improve the earth as they improved themselves. with the
resurrection of Christ, they believed, the earth itself,
the quality of the climate, soil, and crops would change,
assuming an Edenic state. s Donald H. Dyal, whose 1980
study outlined the tenets of Mormon agrarianism, recorded
that early Mormon leaders preached "the regeneration of
.4 Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon
Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900
(Tucson, 1973), 7.
S Parley Pratt, a Church apostle, as cited in Dyal,
"The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 127.
16
the earth not only as a spiritual event, but also a
physical or more specifically agricultural event."6 Thus
Mormon farmers, like American farmers across the Midwest
and the Great Plains, saw their work as essential to the
creation of a good place, a democratic place, a place safe
from the despotism of foreigners, the depredations of
natives, and the unprincipled machinations of speculators.
Agricultural labor was indeed the key element in the
creation of a godly place in utah. Farm work provided the
Mormons with their only true means of finding a place in
God's kingdom.' This agricultural redemption of the
earth, according to Leonard J. Arrington, the pre-eminent
historian of Mormon Utah, constituted one of the seven
basic principles of Mormon theology. such redemption,
defined as lithe orderly development of local resources,"
implied that "[m]aking the waste places blossom as a rose,
and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits,
was more than an economic necessity; it was a form of
religious worship."8
In previous stages of American settlement, the
pursuit of . an ideal society peopled by yeoman farm
6 Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 128.
, Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 133.
8 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An
Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. 1830-1900
(Cambridge, MA, 1958), 25-26.
17
families had required only hard work, perseverance, a
strong faith in God's obvious favor toward a white,
democratic civilization, and, of course, an abundance of
fertile land. In Utah, that was not enough. About 15
inches of rain fell annually on the benchlands and valley
floors of the sloping foothills of the Wasatch Front.
Even with their hard work, steel-willed leadership, and
unswerving confidence in God's favor, the Utah Saints also
needed water. The arid environment provided the backdrop
against which Utah settlers developed a strong set of
connections between the creation of ideal agricultural
communities and the bringing of irrigation water to their
farms.
The deterministic power of aridity frequently plagues
students of American western history. Did western history
unfold along certain lines because the land received less
than twenty inches of annual rainfall and thus prohibited
humid-land agriculture? Donald Worster and Wallace
stegner, two of the finest scholars of the West, see
aridity as an essential factor in the region's history.
The West is as it is, stegner declares, because "Anyone
who wants to live in the West has to manage water to some
degree." They must obey a law of water scarcity, and live
18
"within the country's rules of sparseness of mobility.,,9
In the Mormon west the water question is heightened by the
unique characteristics of utah as a sub-region. The
saints' West sprang up differently from everything that
came after. Does aridity account for the Mormons'
distinctive modes of settlement? Is water the absolute
key to understanding Mormon Utah? Worster, stegner, and
others who have addressed that question have established
beyond all doubt that the Mormon's beliefs concerning
their arid environment are as, or more, important in
understanding Utah's history, than the lack of rainfall
itself. Utah Mormons incorporated their encounters with
the arid Great Basin into their history, their belief
system, and their vision of themselves, and those images
of dryness reveal much about the role of water in the
Mormon past.
The creation of an Edenic agricultural civilization
in a barren desert was a central myth of 19th- and early
20th-century Utah Mormon culture. That myth grew out of
the parallels between the saints' migration to Utah and
the Biblical exodus, and out of the Mormon leaders' post-settlement
exaggerations of the aridity of the land along
the Wasatch Front. It turned on the belief that the east
9 Wallace stegner, The American West as LiVing Space
(Ann Arbor, 1987), 36.
19
side of the Salt Lake Valley was so dry and infertile that
it could not have supported just any group of Euro­American
settlers; only the chosen could have built an
oasis in that environment. "'I am thankful to a fulness
[sic]," declared Young in 1847, "that the Lord has brought
us to these barren valleys, to these sterile mountains, to
this desolate waste, where only the Saints can or would
live .... "w This exaggeration began as a tool for group
motivation and celebration, a way of encouraging settlers
to conquer new deserts by invoking wastelands already
banished. 11 It became, however, a fundamental building
block of collective Mormon identity: the belief that the
first settlers had brought water to an unproductive land
and made the world anew.
In reality, as geographer Richard Jackson has
proven, the first utah settlers settled an admittedly
challenging environment that was in no way barren. They
had planned it that way. Brigham Young reviewed all
available information on the Great Salt Lake region prior
to the beginning of the Mormons' 1847 overland trek. He
read trappers' and explorers' accounts of the region,
w Journal of Discourses, 4 (Liverpool, 1847), 344,
as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 198.
11 See Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality:
Environmental Perception of the Mormons, 1840-1865,
An Historical Geosophy" (Ph.D. diss., Clark
University, 1970), 84, 188.
20
which described it in turn as possessing "more than
ordinary fertility and productiveness," as "most beautiful
country ..• intersected by a number of transparent
streams. ,,12 Explorer and legendary self-promoter John C.
Fremont wrote of the northern Salt Lake Valley that "[t]he
bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient;
the soil good, and well adapted to the grains and grasses
suited to such an elevated region •••• "u
Migrants to the Wasatch Front in the 1850s and
1860s did not settle a parched land, but rather a "narrow
oasis" in the foothills of the Wasatch mountains. w The
initial wave of settlers, Jackson established, described
their new home not as a forbidding wasteland, but as
abundant and fertile, well-suited to agricultural
pursuits. They found an environment fortuitously suited
to their understanding of how nature should support
12 On the Bear River Valley, Lanford W. Hastings,
The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California (1845;
repr. Princeton, NJ, 1932), 19; and fur trader Daniel
Potts in Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley
(Barre, MA, 1960), 63, both as quoted in Richard H.
Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 67, 74.
13 John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the
Rocky Mountains and to Oregon and Northern California
(Washington, DC, 1845), 144, as quoted in Jackson,
. "Myth and Reality," 81.
14 Dan L. Flores, "Islands in the Desert: An
Environmental Interpretation of the Rocky Mountain
Frontier" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University,
1978), 238.
certain kinds of community life. surveying numerous
diaries kept by first generation settlers, Jackson found
few if any references to the environment as a "desert" a
"wasteland," or "barren."lS Instead, Jackson concluded,
21
Brigham Young and his fellow leaders fostered a set of
myths in the years following successful settlement that
caused the larger Mormon community to integrate into their
own history and consciousness a conviction that they had,
with the assistance of divine power, transformed a desert
into an oasis. 16 The Journal of Discourses, a collection
of the writings of Mormon leaders, offered convincing
examples of the instillation of the belief that the
Wasatch Front had, in 1847, been little more than, in the
words of George A. smith, "a desert, containing nothing
but a few bunches of dead grass, and crickets enough to
fence the land."n
This idea that the well-governed, hard-working
populace, and the green, thriving, well-watered fields
could not have been possible in the desert without divine
intervention held fast in Mormon culture, to be applied
again and again as settlers struck out for new colonies
lS Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 135, 134, 172.
16 See Jackson's discussion of these myths in "Myth
and Reality," 190.
n Journal of Discourses, 1 (Liverpool, 1852), 44, as
quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 190.
22
beyond the core region. Non-Mormon visitors enhanced the
mythology. After glimpsing the verdant valleys and
comparing them with other western locales, travelers came
away with a distinct sense of the Mormons as a favored
population. 18 God's particular care in fostering the
saints' survival has remained a viable tenet of Mormon
history for over a century.~
Irrigation was the single activity most key to the
transformation of the landscape from which these
environmental myths were formed. It was also the key to
the actual work done by settlers in the building of the
Mormon kingdom. The di-version of water from mountain
streams to gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures was
important to the Mormon understanding of the human place
in nature, and of nature in history. As decades passed
and the memories of those who had actually seen pre­settlement
Utah faded, the power over nature achieved by
both God and Mormon settlers continued to increase.
Pioneer history moved beyond the litany of the blossoming
desert toward a belief in the actual improvement of the
Utah climate itself. As Great Plains settlers believed
that rain followed the plow, so Mormons came to believe
that irrigation enhanced river flow. A writer in the
18 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 207.
19 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 166.
23
Millennial star, a Mormon periodical claimed in 1884 that
"Many streams have been greatly increased in volume, and
in some places new springs have burst forth in the
desert ..•• The rainfall has greatly increased in some
localities. ,,20 water was a dynamic participant in the
mythic transformation of the desert into a garden. Each
Mormon irrigator, from 1847 on, saw himself or herself to
be participating in, and re-enacting, that transformation.
The water itself connected them to their higher religious
mission.
The Utah settlers' administration of natural
resources, most notably land, timber, and water, embodied
other theological aspects of the Mormon belief system.
Mormons held that the earth's resources belonged to God,
and were held by human beings only in a temporary state of
stewardship. Stewardship meant that the church, through
the community, allotted each individual only the amount of
land and resources that he could use for the benefit of
the community. Like the redemption of the earth,
stewardship comprised a basic tenet governing Mormon
Utah. 21
Collective stewardship as expressed in Mormon Utah
20 J. H. Ward, "Utah, Past and Present," Millennial
star 46 (1884): 520-22, as quoted in Charles S.
Peterson, Take Up Your Mission, 158.
21 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25.
24
implied a collective or cooperative mastery over nature.
Because they were stewards of their land and resources,
rather than outright individual owners, Mormon settlers
bore a specific set of obligations to the community and to
the church. Only through full and beneficial use of the
earth's bounty, they believed, could the kingdom grow.
Each individual, in maximizing the production of a single
family's allotment, could support that growth. In
addition, ten percent of a family's annual production was
given to the Church to support its activities.
Mormon communitarianism demanded that the interests
of the community come before those of the individual.
That collective legacy has come under much scholarly
scrutiny in recent decades, as historians have tested the
degree to which Mormon communities actually practiced the
communal ideals that they preached. The debate over
communalism has included considerations of the nature of
Mormon self-sufficiency, of their system of economic
distribution, and of their modes of economic production.
In a 1978 study of the political economy of Spring City, a
central utah town, Michael scott Raber contrasted local
modes of production with modes of distribution. Raber
worked from the premise that where village- and territory­wide
distribution of farm and village products were
25
communitarian, modes of production were not.n Raber
concluded that the individual family, not the community,
formed the basic unit of production and of the theological
quest for salvation through labor on the land. Donald
oyal reached a similar conclusion in his study of agrarian
values in Mormonism, noting that, in Mormon communities,
U[t]he individual or individual family is the basal unit
of all activity.un The family existed as a self-contained
production unit and a microcosm of ·God's
universal family, but according to religious and economic
ideals, the domestic unit was expected to work and produce
not primarily not only for their own benefit, but for that
of the collective as well.
In contrasting the family with the community as
important utah institutions, Michael Raber raised a number
of important points concerning the linkage between
agricultural labor, nature, and community. Raber claimed
that the Mormon settlement system, with centralized
direction of colonization and collective ownership and
development of natural resources for the common good, did
not persist beyond the most initial stages of the
colonization process. Those early years saw the
22 Michael Scott Raber, "Religious Polity and Local
Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town" (Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 1978), 11.
n Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 163.
26
conversion of common, public resources into privately held
allotments. Those allotments became the domain of
individual households, and those households were
responsible for the production of most of the goods
necessary to sustain themselves.
In Mormon communities, Raber contends, there were two
levels of production: the household level, and the supra­household,
or community level.u As a single entity, the
community cleared fields, built fences, and dug irrigation
canals. These were not tasks of actual economic
production.~ These centrally organized projects, Raber
points out, were for the most past one-time efforts to
create the infrastructure of production, which would then
support each family's independent quest to support itself.
The individual laborer contributed his time and effort to
these collective tasks only to the extent that he would
personally benefit. In fact, the individual was assigned
community labor--a length of fence or a stretch of canal-­in
direct proportion to the size and demands of his
individual holdings. In Raber's version of Mormon village
labor, an aggregate group of individuals sacrificed
fragments of their valuable time to assist in the breaking
U Raber, "Religious Policy and Local Production,"
288.
~ Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
289.
up of common resources into usable pieces. Once the
fences were built and the ditches dug, each family could
depend on protected fields and a sufficient allotment of
water. Little need remained for further communal labor.
Raber concludes that the most striking feature of the
Mormon political economy was not its cooperative nature
but "the relative lack of corporate arrangements for
production at levels of operation above or beyond the
household, and the self-conscious containment within the
household of as much labor as needed on individual farm
tasks .... ,,26
Raber's analysis of these underlying economic
patterns rightly emphasizes the importance of family in
27
the Mormon community. Like John Borrowman and his journal
record of his first son's birth, the individual utah
settler understood and expressed his or her attachments to
God, land, and community through the lens of family.
Raber does not consider, however, the ways in which the
individual family remained connected to the community,
especially to its ideals, its work, and its resources,
after the initial community projects were completed. One
of the ways they remained connected was through their
continued use of irrigation water. water in Mormon
26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
288.
28
communities flowed out of canyons, which were public
spaces, through main-line canals, which were owned and
managed by community groups, and, finally, into fields and
yards, which were worked by families for family survival.
water connected those different realms, and thus connected
families to the community. It also caused conflicts
between families and the community. The larger purpose of
the irrigation system, as Raber pointed out, was indeed to
bring water to family spaces, to private spaces.v But it
passed out of nature and through the community to get to
those spaces, and thus both nature and community played a
role in family water use. In addition, Mormon family
activities of building and beautifying a home and garden,
and raising children to further the religious community,
were inherently connected to larger communal goals.
Raber's conclusion that the collective construction
of economic infrastructure of production was a one-time
happening after which the individual family took over the
bulk of economic activity is tempered by his admission
that water was a resource different in quality and use
from land, animals, timber, homes, and churches. The
creation of an irrigation system did not immediately
produce anything, but instead created a means for
v Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
190.
29
producing from fields, gardens, and orchards. "The
difference was," Raber admitted, "that irrigation involved
continuing renewal of this act of creation, while the less
fluid elements of crop production did not. ,,28 Community
irrigation construction efforts could last for years, and
the repairs could last forever. In this "continual
renewal" of the "act of creation," the annual planning and
carrying out of the repair and use of the irrigation
canals and ditches, lay the crux of these linkages between
individual Mormon families and the Mormon spiritual
universe. Cooperative economic activity sometimes did
decline sharply after the early years of settlement, but
each individual family remained tied to the legacy of that
cooperativism by continuing ties to irrigation systems, to
which they still contributed labor or taxes, and from
which they drew water. Those ties to their community were
not always welcome, or peaceful, or productive, but they
remained. And every spring, with the start of the
irrigation season, Mormons re-affirmed the connections
between their labor, their community, their mastery of
nature in the proving of God's bounty, and their
redemption of the earth.
Water and work gave substance to these connections.
28 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
289.
30
Mastery of nature and the purifying of the land served as
powerful motivating ideals, but most Mormon families
devoted their lives to muddy physical labor. The history
of that labor is distinctive not because of the doctrine
of stewardship or the injunction to master nature, but
because of the clarity and faith with which the people
themselves understood stewardship, mastery, neighborly
relations, and the day-to-day meaning of their work.
Henry Ballard, a Cache Valley settler, reported a
gathering of neighbors in the "well crowded" Logan
schoolhouse on the undoubtedly chilly evening of February
4, 1860. "It was a time of rejoicing," Ballard wrote.
"Brother Hammon[d] Advised us not to forget our Dutys when
the Spring opened but to be Alive to our Duty at all times
in the Kanyon and in our fields and in all our
movements.,,29 Forty-five years later an editorial in the
agricultural periodical Deseret Farmer claimed that "One
of the greatest joys of the farmer's life should come from
a realization of the relation of his work to that of his
Creator. He is co-operating with nature--which is the
handiwork of God--and from lifeless, . useless things he
creates articles for which a hungry, dependent world is
29 Henry Ballard Journal, 4 February 1860, TS, Joel E.
Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vols. 1-2, Utah
State University Library, Logan, UT.
31
longing. ,,30
That Henry Ballard and his fellow saints strove to be
alive to their duty while cutting timber or digging
ditches, or that they thought about their duty to their
community and their God, gave them a connection to the
land and water with which they worked. They understood
themselves to be cooperating with nature, even when they
had no conception of the autonomous ecological processes
which they interrupted. Their labor had layers of
symbolic meaning; like water, it tied them to nature, to
each other, and to God.
Physical labor, of course, had much to do with the
bringing of water to the newly carved out croplands along
the Wasatch benches. The act of working together to build
and maintain ditches reinforced the connections between
nature, community, and the religious mission. Long after
utah was integrated into mainstream America and its
culture of rampant individuality, irrigation systems
continued to require the aggregate labor of individual
water users, and continued to reinforce those linkages.
The paradoxes of being an individual both separate from
the community, and connected by labor and water to the
physical community and the spiritual universe, permeated
30 "The Other Side of Farming," Deseret Farmer 1 (15
June 1905).
Mormon life. Those paradoxes found one avenue of
expression in the myriad uses of water.
32
33
CHAPTER III
FROM LOGAN RIVER TO LOGAN TOWN
Prior to 1859, water flowed out of the high limestone
confines of Logan canyon and into Cache Valley without
crossing any major thresholds other than the gradual slope
of the valley floor . . with rapid Mormon settlement in the
early 1860s, the Logan River became part of a new ecology,
a new system of encounters and exchanges in which the
river itself played a crucial part. with its shaping of,
and integration into, the villages of the east side of the
valley, the river was channelled in new directions, for
new purposes, across new thresholds.
As the villages of Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield
sprang up, and as their citizens dug canals between them,
the water flowed out of the canyon, a "natural" realm,
into the towns, which were spiritual communities with a
specific millennialist purpose, and a distinctive physical
structure which reflected that spiritual goal. Within
those communities, water diverted from the Logan River
flowed between the larger social world of the village into
the smaller domains of individual families. In doing so
it flowed from the patriarchal world where male heads of
household worked with, controlled, and directed water, to
34
the familial world of the house and garden. In the main
"trunk" canals which crossed the benches, pastures, and
grain fields, water flowed between the separate villages,
connecting them in ways no other shared resource could.
The Logan River possessed natural characteristics
that attracted Mormon settlers and structured the ways in
which they used water. In comparison with other
drainages, it was easily exploited. Any understanding of
community water use must first take the river itself, and
the landscape, into account. From its headwaters
northeast of the town of Logan, the Logan River runs
twenty-odd miles through the Bear River mountains, a spur
of the Wasatch mountains, and down Logan Canyon to the
floor of Cache Valley, where it joins the Bear River. The
river drains 223 square miles of watershed, a topography
that ranges from elevations of just over 4,000 feet above
sea level to nearly 10,000 feet.l The Bear River
mountains are predominantly limestone, with sandstone and
dolomite in places. None of those rock formations readily
absorb water. 2 Large glacial deposits at the center of
the watershed do absorb water, and their storage capacity
1 Frank W. Haws, "A critical Analysis of Water Rights
and Institutional Factors and their Effect on the
Development of Logan River" (Master's thesis, utah
state University, 1965), 4.
2 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 9.
35
supplies the river's continuous flow. 3 The geology of the
region thus insures that most of the precipitation that
falls on the watershed ends up in the river.
The key climatological aspect of the valley's
dependence on the Logan River watershed is the sharp
discrepancy in precipitation between the valley floor and
the nearby mountains. Annual precipitation in Cache
Valley averages just over sixteen inches. The high peaks
of the Bear River range just east of the valley, average
over fifty inches in a year, most of it in the winter, in
the form of snow. Because the Logan watershed is, in the
words of water economist Frank Haws, a "tightly closed
hydrologic system," it allows minimum loss or gain of
water to or from invisible sources. The river thus
efficiently conveys a sUbstantial volume of water out of
the ' inaccessible mountains and canyon and onto the valley
floor. There the annual surface runoff is quite easily
harnessed by hand-dug irrigation systems. 4 The keys to
that water management are the seasonal patterns of
precipitation and river flow, which must be manipulated to
provide water according to human, rather than natural,
patterns.
After emerging from the mountains at the mouth of
3 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11.
4 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11.
36
Logan Canyon, the river cuts through the benches on the
eastern slopes of the valley, and across the flat valley
floor, meeting the Bear River in the middle of lowlying
wetlands at the valley's center. Like the Great Salt Lake
Valley, Cache Valley is a legacy of Lake Bonneville, the
great inland sea of which Salt Lake is a surviving
remnant. About 18,000 years ago, the ancient lake reached
its highest level at an elevation of just over 5,000 feet.
Streams entering the lake formed deltas of sand and gravel
which became high benches at the mouths of canyons; as the
lake's level dropped, new deltas formed out of "sandy,
porous chestnut soils, fertile and rich in lime."s This
successive formation of deltas and fans at different
levels left a series of flat, raised steps that climbed
down the valley's walls. As it receded further, the lake
left layers of alluvial deposits which now form the valley
floor. 6
The nineteenth-century Mormon immigrants settled in
the transition zone of the Wasatch mountain range, an area
environmental historian Dan Flores characterizes as a
"narrow, rich, alluvial piedmont of fans, deltas, and
S Dan L. Flores, "Zion in Eden: Phases of the
Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review
7 (Winter 1983): 328.
6 A. J. Simmonds, "Lake Bonneville Sculpted Cache
Valley Landscape," [Logan, UT] Herald Journal, 26
March 1989, Bridgerland section, 90-91.
37
terraces, through which meandered the sweet clear water of
the mountains."7 Receiving between 13 and 18 inches of
rain and snow in a year, this corridor of fertile soils
was, in Cache Valley even more than along the Great Salt
Lake, particularly suited to Mormon social, religious, and
economic goals of agrarian communitarianism, self­sufficiency,
and isolation. As settlers gravitated toward
the confluence of water, timber, fertile soil, and grazing
bottoms at the mouths of the canyons, they remade the
transition zone into a Mormon settlement zone. The
villages that the Utah pilgrims located on and near the
Logan river, like others along the Wasatch Front,
evidenced a perceptive environmental strategy, a
consciousness of the value of the resources available in
those particular places. That consciousness was reflected
in the organization and form of the villages themselves,
as well as in their location against the dramatic backdrop
of the Wasatch foothills.
The structure of Mormon communities, like the
structure of the Logan River watershed, or of the soils of
Cache Valley's alluvial benches, is crucial to an
understanding of the flow of water between the two. The
Mormon village, according to Leonard J. Arrington, held a
venerable place, with the redemption of the earth and the
7 Flores, "Zion in Eden," 327.
38
stewardship of property, as an underlying economic ideal
of the Saints' mission, one of the key foundation stones
in the edifice of the Kingdom. 8 The village pattern was
based on the Plat of the city of Zion, a plan first put
forth by church founder Joseph smith in the early 1830s
when he planned settlements for Jackson County, Missouri.
smith's plan called for a mile square village with blocks
of ten acres divided into twenty lots, each a half acre in
size. streets ran east/west or north/south. House lots
included room for a garden and lawn, or orchard. Farmland
was located outside the residential areas of the town. 9
This Missouri-born plan continued to guide village
planning once the Mormons left the Midwest for Utah.
Though conceived long before the saints' plans to move to
the arid west, the four-square, compact village surrounded
by crop fields proved, as Leonard Arrington pointed out,
"peculiarly adapted" to Mormon goals for life in the Great
Basin. 10 The tightly concentrated housing pattern kept
settlers close together, providing for a wealth of social
and religious activities, easy regulation of community
projects, and collective defense against displaced groups
of Shoshone-Bannocks. In addition, Arrington noted, the
8 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24-25.
9 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 10.
10 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24.
village as it developed on the Wasatch Front and
throughout Utah, "permitted effective irrigation
culture."n
39
The compact settlement pattern that characterized
Mormon villages, though evolved from ideal images of early
New England towns, contributed significantly to the
success of Utah irrigation. with homes and gardens
concentrated in a small area, a few main canals branching
from the local river were split into networks of smaller
ditches. These in turn brought water to each family, with
the water itself traveling as little distance as possible.
The same main canals could carry water to agricultural
fields both before and after they passed through the
residential areas of the village. Those same canals could
continue beyond the boundaries of the village and its
fields to serve the next village to the north or south
along the base of the foothills. The Mormon village
pattern thus encouraged efficiency of ditch-digging and of
water use, though efficiency was not always the result.
The importance of water and its flow within the village
grid itself will be taken up in the next chapter. Water
outside that grid, in canals and between villages, held
different meanings.
Samuel Fortier, a hydrographer and engineer who
n Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25.
40
surveyed Cache Valley's water resources in the late 1890s,
drew a detailed map of the region, showing the irrigation
canals and ditches and the land they watered [Figures 2,
2AJ. Fortier's map demonstrates the marked contrast
between the path of Logan River canals between the
separate village grids of Logan, Hyde Park, and
smithfield, and their trajectories within the villages
themselves. Outside the rigid geometry of the towns, the
canals looked somewhat like tributaries to the rivers,
curving with the topography of the valley's sloping floor.
within the gridS, especially in Logan, the canals followed
the straight lines and right angles the village streets,
conforming to the order that the Mormons brought to their
wilderness. The flow of water outside towns and between
towns looked different, looked more river-like, more
"natural." The canals' curving paths appeared somewhat
analogous to that of the river itself. Folklorist Austin
Fife noticed the contrasts between natural patterns of
river flow and strict angles of the village grid. He
wrote in 1979 that "the rectangular grids followed by the
fenced property lines and roads did not synchronize with
the terrain features that had to be followed in order to
always keep the naturally flowing water where it could
I
Figure 2. Cache Valley Basin with Inset [see Figure 2A]
Showing Logan River Canals, Including Logan and Richmond,
and Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canals. From Samuel
Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley (Logan, 1897).
i!
~ .....
42
N
43
reach the cultivatable land."n Beyond village
boundaries, irrigation canals were more like rivers. They
were, in fact, new, human-made rivers, directed toward
community ends, but eternally plagued by non-human nemeses
such as mountain topography, muskrats, mudslides, moss,
and floods.
In a recent history of Chicago, western and
environmental historian William Cronon uses the Hegelian
and Marxist ideas of "first nature" and "second nature" to
explore how 19th-century Chicagoans defined, and
redefined, the "natural. "13 In Chicago, "first nature,"
the original, naturally created landscape, embodied a
range of different possibilities open to Euro-American
settlers and developers. out of "their vision of what it
should be" early Chicagoans built on top of that first
landscape, "[a] kind of 'second nature,' designed by
people and 'improved' toward human ends. "14 In doing so,
they imposed "their own order ••• on the world of first
12 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned, Horse Powered,
Irrigated, Multiple Produce Farms of the
Intermountain West," TS, 1979, Utah state University
Library, Logan, UT, 13.
13 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: chicago and
the Great West (New York, 1991), xvii. Nature's
Metropolis explores the city's meteoric development
through the transformation of its western hinterland,
and in the commoditization of the goods--grain, wood,
and meat--produced in that transformation.
W Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 55-56.
44
nature ••.• ,,15 That human order remained "natural,"
though, because it conformed to human visions of what
should happen in that particular place, the trajectory of
the appropriate course of events. Furthermore, "second
nature" so thoroughly obscured "first nature" that it took
its place. That which was man-made was taken to be a gift
of nature, so easily, so "naturally," had it arisen in
nature's place.
According to this idea of second nature, the
railroads which passed through Chicago seemed natural.
The flat landscape around the city and in it,s hinterland
was "peculiarly suited" to railroads, much as the fringes
of the Wasatch Front seemed so "naturally" adapted to
compact Mormon villages and their irrigation systems. 16
That either of them--Chicago railroads or utah irrigation
canals--sprang up and thrived, seemed entirely natural, as
did their transformation of the surrounding landscape. In
addition, Cronon points out, the bison and pine trees,
which had once been part only of "first nature," became
something entirely different when drawn into the human­constructed
world of "second nature. ,,17 They became
commodities of the market, "things priced, bought, and
15 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 146.
16 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 72.
n Cronan, Nature's Metropolis, 266.
sold within a system of human exchange. ,,18 water in utah
followed much the same path.
45
Cronon also proposes that the distance between first
nature and second nature, is, in the history of Chicago
and its hinterland, a measure of the movement from "local
ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy. ,,19
In other words, the extent to which human construction of
second nature obliterates first nature signals the degree
of a place's integration into a larger economic system.
It is that larger system, one of global markets, that
redefines the "local" as something that is no longer
local, that reshapes the first nature that made a city or
a hinterland what it was to begin with, into something
entirely different.
Cronon's discussions of first and second nature,
though focused on a topic far from Mormon irrigation canal
systems, make a number of important points about any human
manipulation of a natural landscape. First of all, the
canals that Cache Valley Mormons built to carry water from
the Logan River to their houses, yards, and fields
constituted a form of second nature. They caused water to
flow to places it had not flowed before, changing not only
the n·ewly-watered land, but the river itself. To the
18 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 266.
19 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 267.
46
settlers who oversaw that process, the canals became,
literally, second nature, an obvious, "natural" solution
to their need to redistribute the river to meet human
needs. The canals became elements of a landscape destined
for a full-fledged flowering of the Mormon kingdom and for
the fulfillment of the land's bounteous agricultural and
"natural" potential.
The water that flowed out of the Logan River and into
irrigation canals was thus redefined, culturally, and
economically. It was made part of a unique system of
human exchange, given all of the spiritual, cultural, and
historical meanings that Mormons bestowed upon water. The
water of the Logan, as it flowed through Cache Valley
villages, became part of a second nature. It was
irrevocably separated from the water that continued on,
uncaptured, across the valley to the Bear River, and into
the Great Salt Lake. As irrigation water, it was
measured, timed, commoditized, distributed, stored, and
fought over in ways that changed its meaning and identity.
While irrigation canals formed a vital and distinct
second nature, imposed by human artifice, they did not
subsume the Logan River itself. The Logan continued to
flow, even if diminished, much as it .always had. First
and second nature co-existed to a certain degree, both
remaining visible, both struggling with the other to
47
assert its own order and dominance. According to Cronon's
formulation, this "failure" of second nature to obliterate
first nature was an indication of the enduring localism of
this particular cultural and economic use of nature. In
Cache Valley, second nature was built on top of first
nature without causing first nature to be completely lost.
Both "natures" were natural, but neither gained the upper
hand, neither came to completely dominate the other.
Mormon settlers lived and irrigated in Salt Lake
Valley for a dozen years before Church President Brigham
Young dispatched colonizers north to Cache Valley.
Young's scouts had termed Cache "the most beautiful valley
that they had seen," on an initial survey in August
1847 .20 Grazers took church cattle herds north to graze
in Cache Valley in 1855, but harsh conditions--colder
winters than the Salt Lake area--discouraged settlement
until 1856, when Peter and Mary Ann Maughan and their
family founded Wellsville. Skirmishes with Shoshone
cattle rustlers and the threat from the federal army in
the Utah War further delayed a proper foothold of villages
W Thomas Bullock Pioneer Camp Journal No.2, 1847,
quoted in Joel E. Ricks, Forms and Methods of Early
Mormon Settlement in Utah and the Surrounding Region.
1847 to 1877 (Logan, UT, 1964), 43.
until 1859. 21 Over 2,000 settlers, many of them northern
European immigrants, flooded in over the next two years,
establishing a string of towns at the base of the
48
mountains including Paradise, Millville, Logan, Hyde Park,
Mendon, and Smithfield. This impressive rate of
colonization continued through the early 1860s, with Logan
reaching a population of 1,727 by 1870, and Smithfield of
676 by 1867.n That growth continued. Over 5,700 people
lived in Logan by 1895, and over 1,400 in Smithfield. In
only 35 years, 18,286 people settled in Cache Valley,
rapidly transforming its landscape and the flow of water
across that landscape. n
When the newly arrived citizens of Logan first
diverted the waters of the Logan River in mid-May of 1860,
they baptized themselves and the river into a new set of
hierarchies--beliefs, laws, and practices--concerning
water use. The basic tenets of religious belief that
21 Ricks, FOrms and Methods of Early Mormon
Settlement, 64-65; and Feramorz Young Fox, "The
Mormon Land System: A Study of the Settlement and
Utilization of Land Under the Direction of the Mormon
Church" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932),
65.
n Logan population figure from Haws, "Development of
.Logan River," 42; Smithfield population figure from
The History of Smithfield (Smithfield, UT, 1927), 8.
n Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley,
Utah Agricultural Experiment station Bulletin no. 50
(Logan, UT, 1897), 16.
49
influenced water use have been outlined, but the structure
of actual irrigation practice that grew from those beliefs
and from the settlers' goals for their community are of
equal importance in unravelling the place of water in that
community.
The history of Utah irrigation institutions has been
told numerous times since the late 19th century by skilled
historians and engineers armed with massive documentary
evidence of, and direct experience with, state-wide
patterns of water administration.~ A firm consensus on
the basic characteristics of the Mormon system runs
through those histories. This consensus holds that
Brigham Young formulated a water policy by combining the
principle of divinely granted stewardship of the earth's
resources with knowledge gained form Hispanic water
systems. Drawing from those sources, he decreed that
water was a public resource, owned in common by all
~ This work includes: Charles Hillman Brough,
Irrigation in Utah (Baltimore, 1895); William E.
Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York,
1900>'; George Thomas, The Development of Institutions
Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early
Utah Conditions (New York, 1920); Elwood Mead, Report
of Irrigations Investigations in Utah, U. S.
Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment
Stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1903);
and John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of
the Evolution of Institutions Dealing with Water
Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947"
(Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989).
50
members of the community.~ Water rights were grounded in
the dual doctrines of beneficial" use and prior
appropriation. The first to divert water from its natural
course and put it to work in a manner useful to the
community established rights to the amount diverted. Only
a lapse of beneficial use abrogated those rights.
Another key element of water use concerns the Mormon
Church hierarchy, which controlled water rights until well
into the twentieth century, and in informal ways does so
today. As a result, "beneficial use" meant "beneficial"
in the eyes of the church, beneficial to the progress of
the community as they defined both "progress" and
"community. ,,26 This meant that any use of water not
sanctioned by the church could be relegated to secondary
status. A. J. Simmonds, in his history of non-Mormon
settlers in Cache Valley, described how this led, at least
initially, to a segregation of agricultural pursuits.
Mormons, with their community-constructed water canals,
raised grain crops on irrigated farmland. Gentiles,
~ On the influence of Hispanic water law, Dan L.
Flores, in "Zion in Eden," 330, noted that church
leaders borrowed the idea of public ownership of
water combined with priority rights to diversion from
Hispanic communities of the Southwest. Richard
Jackson notes that the Mormon battalion sent to fight
the Mexican War studied irrigation systems in "Myth
and Reality," 120.
26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
168.
51
locked out of those canal systems by religious separatism,
settled less irrigable parts of the valley, and supported
themselves by raising livestock.v
These principles of public supervision, beneficial
use, and ecclesiastical control distinguished Mormon water
systems from those of other western regions. other
qualities contributed to their distinctness as well:
their cooperative nature; their diminutive scale in
comparison to other projects across the West; the simple
tools used in their construction; and the speed,
simplicity, and frugality of that construction. In 1865,
even with ever-mounting numbers of Utah settlers demanding
new and larger canals, the 277 existing canals in the
territory averaged a mere 3.7 miles in length. 28 The over
800 cooperatively owned ditches carrying water in Utah in
1920 had an average capacity of 24.5 second-feet, compared
to the over 70 second-feet of water that ran in ditches in
California, Idaho, and Colorado.~ Whatever magic made
v See A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache
Valley: A Study of the Logan Apostasies of 1874 and
the Establishment of Non-Mormon Churches in Cache
Valley. 1873-1913 (Logan, UT, 1976).
28 Leonard J. Arrington and Dean May, "'A Different
Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth­Century
Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of
the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D.
C., 1975),8.
29 Fox, "The Mormon Land System," 5.
the Mormon irrigation system successful, that magic had
nothing to do with scale. The Mormon genius for
distributing water lay in their consistent ability to
manage small volumes of water.
52
The pioneers' rapid construction of the first canals
has become legendary in utah, and is chronicled in
innumerable community histories. Leonard Arrington
recorded the Cache Valley tale of how 28 men and boys from
the town of Hyrum, south of Logan, spent most of the month
of May, 1860 digging a nine mile long, four-foot deep
irrigation ditch, by hand, while the town shored them up
with daily deliveries of food and milk.~ Just to the
north, Logan settlers labored from late March to mid-May
of 1860 scraping out enough of the Logan and Hyde Park
canal to water 2000 acres that first summer. 31 Each
farmer contributed labor in proportion to his land
holdings, which were limited by family size, and doled out
in twenty acre parcels by church leaders. Most of the
ditch work was done with picks, shovels, and wooden plows
pulled by ox-teams. Milk-pails and home-made plumb lines
~ Leonard J. Arrington, "Life and Labor Among the
Pioneers," in The History of a Valley: Cache Valley,
Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956), 149-
50.
31 Joel E. Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In
Cache Valley, Twelfth Annual Faculty Research
Lecture, Utah State Agricultural College (Logan, UT,
1953), 23.
53
served as surveying tools. There is no denying the co­operative
nature of this work, the almost total lack of
capital investment, or the speed with which water reached
the croplands. The centrality of the first act of
communal ditch-digging to pioneer narratives underscored
the parallel between the birth of the community and the
first watering of the land. 32
While this general picture of pioneer irrigation
provides an accurate account of the cooperation demanded
of Utah settlers in the face of isolation and starvation,
it lacks depth. Most Utah historians, and water
historians, invoke this basic outline without providing
much detail to color in the picture. This lack of
specificity is rooted in a point that Leonard Arrington
and Dean May made in their 1975 discussion of irrigation
as '" A Different Mode of Life.' ,,33 "The most striking
aspect of the institutions devised for the control of
32 For other pioneer accounts, see Marlyn L. Fife,
"Irrigation water Values in Cache County, Utah"
(Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1967), 15i
Ricks, ed., History of a Valley, 149, and Ricks, The
Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, 32; Isaac
Sorensen, "History of Mendon, 1857-1919," TS, Joel E.
Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 1, Utah
state University Library, 3; History of Smithfield,
47; and Richmond Bicentennial Committee, The History
· of Richmond. UT (Richmond, UT, 1976), 17.
33 Arrington and May, '" A Different Mode of Life':
Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah,"
in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West,
ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975).
54
water," May and Arrington wrote, "would seem to be that
they were, for the most part, informal and unarticulated-­barely
institutions in the strictest sense.,,34 Given the
milieu of religious beliefs that surrounded these water
"institutions," it is not hard to understand that they
were "unarticulated," and that historians find it
difficult to pin them down, or to move beyond an
invocation of their standard characteristics into a closer
look at the place of water at various levels of community
life.
The celebrated process by which irrigation canals
came into being, this cooperative labor in the interest of
group survival, held within itself the tension that
remained central to the later administration of the
systems. An individual farmer's contribution of his own
labor to the digging and maintenance of a canal, whether
through labor or taxes, was the key means by which he
secured a private right to have water turned onto his
land. This labor established personal water rights,
becoming, as historian John Harvey writes, lithe most
crucial element in transforming a portion of the public
34 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life, '"
19.
55
domain into usable (semi-private) property. ,,35 An
individual family, once in possession of land and a water
right, and dependent on that land and water for survival,
was forced to straddle an ill-defined line between their
own best interests and that of the community which,
through the ditch, had made their individual freehold
possible, and which sustained them in numerous other
material and spiritual ways. This system of securing
one's place in the community, on the land, and along the
ditch, made perfect sense to those attuned to Brigham
Young's exhortations on manual labor as crucial to the
progress of the community and the Kingdom.~ Just as
individual Mormons devoted themselves to physical labor to
gain membership in the post-resurrection world, so they
labored on irrigation canals to gain their place in the
agricultural approximation of that world in utah.
Salvation and farming were individual pursuits, however,
and therein lay the true challenge of community
irrigation.
The three major canals that ran water from the Logan
river north through Logan toward Hyde Park and smithfield
35 John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the
EVolution of Institutions Dealing with water Resource
Use and Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through
1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989),
19.
36 Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 154.
56
were the Logan and Hyde Park, begun in 1860, the Logan and
Richmond (later Logan Northern), begun in 1864, and the
Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, begun in 1881. As was
common in foothill settlements, irrigators dug the lowest
canal first, the one furthest from the mouth of the canyon
and closest to the center of the incipient town. There,
the gentler slope and easier-managed river banks made the
cutting of headgates fairly simple. Diversion from the
river on a relatively flat plain was the first settlers'
only viable option, as they lacked the time and equipment
to begin ditch construction up in the rocky canyon itself.
within Cache Valley's simple gravity flow irrigation
systems, main canals branched into smaller ditches, and
then into crop rows and village gardens. Water could be
diverted only onto land that lay downhill from the canal,
and thus irrigators referred to their land as being
"under" the canal. The first Logan canal, the Logan and
Richmond, watered land below it, leaving large tracts of
irrigable land above the canal waterless until irrigators
dug the higher, or "high-line" canals. Irrigators started
the later ditches as soon as the rapidly growing
population laid claim to enough land and demanded water.
Since the three main Logan River canals ran down, or west,
from the their diversion points and then swung north
toward Hyde Park and Smithfield, each brought the new
swath of land below it, but above the lower canal, into
cultivation. As folklorist Austin Fife pointed out, the
lines of the canals marked patterns of land use. Land
above the canal, without water, was used for grazing or
dry-farming, and had a distinct, unwatered appearance.
"Below" the canal, the greener orchards, gardens, and
fields evidenced an entirely different regime. TI In
57
bringing land under a canal, Mormon villagers transformed
it from desert to garden. They brought it into their
kingdom, a realm of order and civilization. Each canal,
in bringing another level of the valley's fertile borders
into that realm, constituted an enormous gain, both
materially and spiritually. Samuel Roskelley of
Smithfield reported such a gain in his journal for 1885,
the year in which the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield
Canal was completed as far as Smithfield. "On Tuesday 16
June," he declared in larger-than-usual handwriting,
indicating his excitement, "the water first reached my
land east of my farm through the Upper Logan Canal [ ,']
which is a source of great rejoicing to me, to know that
the water will run through from Logan. ,,38
37 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned Farms," 13.
38 Samuel Roskelley Diary, 20 June 1885, MS, Utah
State University Library, Logan, UT.
58
with this pattern of parallel ditches built at
increasing elevations came a hierarchy of water diversion.
The higher canals, built later than the original, lower-elevation
canals, took water from the Logan River at
points further upstream from the headgates of the earlier
canals. The high-line ditches had the power to take water
first, to affect the water supply of all downstream
diverters. In the late 1890s the Logan, Hyde Park and
Smithfield Canals, the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the
Logan, Hyde Park, and Thatcher Canal ranked first, second,
and fourth in order of elevation, but in opposite order
for priority of diversion. 39 This ascendancy of elevation
over community-sanctioned priorities of water right
required water users under the higher canals to heed the
social restrictions on their favored geographical
position. The members of each canal company had social
and economic relationships with those of the other
companies, much like the relationships among farmers with
land along the same ditch.~ Ideally, those relationships
worked to nullify the natural advantages held by higher­elevation
diverters who could take water before it reached
. 39 Samuel Fortier lists all Logan diverters in order
of elevation in The water Supply of Cache Valley, 19.
~ Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ... and the
Desert Shall Rejoice; Conflict. Growth. and Justice
in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 2.
the headgates of lower canals. The tension between the
social imperatives of the Mormon irrigation system and
those geographic advantages played an important role in
community water use.
The two lower Logan River canals, Logan and Hyde
Park, and Logan and Richmond, came into being under the
59
auspices of the local county court, the first formal legal
institution charged with the allocation of water
resources, and the first administrative structure to give
some shape to the "informal and unarticulated" world of
water use. 41 Peter Maughan, founder of Wellsville--Cache
Valley's first town--and a bishop, or ward leader
appointed by the Church, took his position as probate
judge of Cache County at its creation in 1856, well before
permanent settlement. In doing so he became both civil
and religious leader of the community.~ As county judge,
Maughan had direct control over the allocation of natural
resources. He was directed in that function by an 1852
territorial law which read:
The country courts shall ••• have control of all
timber, water privileges, or any watercourse or
creek, to grant mill sites, and exercise such powers
as in their judgment shall best preserve the timber
41 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life,'"
19.
42 Craig Woods Fuller, "Development of Irrigation in
Wasatch County" (Master's thesis, Utah state
University, 1973), 28.
60
and subserve the interests of the settlements in the
distribution of water for irrigation or other
purposes. 43
This law embodied Mormon ideals of stewardship and
community development, and contained according to early
analyst Elwood Mead, "some of the best features of the
highest development of irrigation law."44
In lauding Mormon policy, Mead may have had in mind
the inherent localism of administration, as well as the
underlying principle of public ownership of water and
timber. Despite the centralized power inherent in church-directed
Mormon colonization, the probate judge's powers
over water resources represented anything but dictatorship
to Cache Valley settlers. It was more a system of
accepted custom, by which the water flowing through the
community canal could not be taken, or rights to it
challenged by anyone outside the community. Town leaders,
holding the powers granted by both church and court,
decided what was good for the collective. They assured
everyone who worked within the local system the benefits
of that system. Because community benefit involved the
pursuit of an equal distribution of natural resources, the
~ Quoted in Elwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions: A
Discussion of the Economic and Legal Questions
Created by the Growth of Irrigated Agriculture in the
West (New York, 1903), 221.
44 Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 221.
county court had to weigh petitions for water and timber
according to that ideal. It rarely adjudicated direct
conflicts over a particular amount of water or stand of
timber, however. Those fights were settled outside the
legal structure by the parties involved, by watermasters
of irrigation companies, or by local bishops, who,
admittedly, often served as probate judges and town
councilmen. The imperatives of community and of shared
61
wealth dictated that Mormons turn to church institutions,
and to their well-enforced sense of mission and community,
to settle disputes.~
From 1852 until 1880, the county court heard
petitions for rights to irrigation water and mill sites,
and timber and grazing lands. Hyde Park founder William
Hyde applied to the court in December 1862 for "a grant of
one fourth of the water running in the north fork of Logan
River enlarging the present water ditch by which the farms
at Hyde Park are irrigated."~ In June of 1863 the court
granted a mill right to Thomas Smart and Samuel Parkinson
for use of the waters of the Cub River west of Franklin.~
45 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
174.
~ Cache County Court, "'A'County Book of the County
of Cache, Organized April 4, 1857," 'TS, Utah state
University Library, 18.
~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 37.
62
The entire town of Smithfield acquired rights in March
1874 to "the big bend on Bear River" for grazing
purposes. 48 Probate judges also granted individuals or
groupS franchises on certain community projects, including
timber harvesting, the running of saw and grist mills, and
road construction. The county court defined borders of
new towns, and appointed town watermasters and road
supervisors, and other guardians of the infrastructure.
until the Irrigation District Law of 1865 took effect in
Cache Valley, the county court also controlled the
appointment of boards of directors, and the organization
of community irrigation districts and companies, among
them the Logan and Richmond Canal Company, founded in
1864.
The Logan and Richmond Canal got its start in the
usual Mormon way. In 1864, new lands were surveyed above
the towns on the east side of the valley, and Ezra Taft
Benson, church leader for all of Cache Valley, called a
meeting to point out "the benefits that naturally would
arise" from a second, higher Logan River canal. 49 Soon
thereafter, another important segment of the valley's
~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 221.
49 Lydia T. Nyman and Venetta K. Gilgen,
"Miscellaneous Papers on the History of North Logan,
UT," TS, 1959-60, utah state University Library,
Logan, UT, 3.
63
"second nature" came into being. Benson appointed five
men--one each from Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, Richmond,
and Franklin, Idaho--to oversee the project and coordinate
laborers. A professional surveyor ran a line for the
canal from the mouth of the canyon, along the steep slope
of the Logan bench, or "sidehill," and then north out of
Logan toward Hyde Park. 5o Given the rocky conditions at
the canyon mouth, and the gradient of the sidehill, this
second canal posed greater challenges than had the Logan
and Hyde Park in 1860.
In an extension of the each-farmer-digs-in­proportion-
to-his-Iand-holdings labor formula, each town
was assigned a section of the difficult sidehill in
proportion to the acreage that it, as a town, expected to
water from the new canal. 51 Digging began that fall and
continued off and on through the winter. Newly-arrived
immigrants taking up the newly-surveyed lands joined the
previous settlers in digging the canal, and thus earned
their right to irrigate from its flow. By the end of 1865
they had 2000 acres under the new canal. 52
As always, farmers and gardeners under the new canal
established rights to the "new" water by putting that
50 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3.
51 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3.
52 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 45.
64
water to community-defined beneficial uses. Those uses
were, as usual, defined by the small group of men holding
positions of church and community leadership. The impetus
to begin the second canal had come from a powerful,
prominent church leader whose vision for the community was
perceived as having divine sanction. The group charged
with the canal's direction included Samuel Roskelley and
Marriner Merrill, both town bishops--prominent church and
community leaders.
Though this small group of men controlled the
construction and administration of the Logan and Richmond,
they turned to the county court for official recognition
of their activities. The legal structure governing their
efforts shifted slightly however, with passage of the
Irrigation District Law in 1865. The 1865 law empowered
the residents of any geographical area, a valley, village,
or neighborhood, to, with the approval of the county
court, organize and tax themselves for the construction
and management of canals. 53 Under this measure, the court
assured that only those citizens who wanted water, and
wanted to contribute to the construction and upkeep of a
canal, would bear its costs. This spared older groups,
already drawing water from previous canals, the burdens of
53 Arrington and May, II 'A Different Mode of Life, III
10.
65
new projects. 54
As new canals benefitted certain segments of growing
communities more than others, the 1865 law sanctioned the
creation of residential and farm districts, or sub-communities,
based on canals. The irrigation districts
had great powers of exclusion or inclusion. Their claims
to water had the effect of reserving a certain water
supply for the use of a very specific group of people in a
specific geographic area. In 1875 the Cache County Court
approved an irrigation district set up by a group of
citizens from the towns of Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield,
and Richmond. The district included
[a]ll the tract of land lying between the base of the
mountains and the Logan and Hyde Park Canal in Logan
Precinct ••• and ••• in Hyde Park Precinct with all that
tract of land known as the New North and South fields
in smithfield Precinct as well as the New South field
in Richmond Precinct •••• 55
The county court had to approve district boundaries and
54 George Thomas, The Development of Institutions
Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early
Utah Conditions (New York, 1920), 52.
55 Cache County 'A' Book, 26 April 1875, 262. The
same year, the court approved the Providence and
Millville Irrigation District, south of Logan,
granting it "power to construct dams and to have
controll [sic] of all springs, streams, and rivers
for irrigating purposes located in said district, and
to make canal for the distribution of said waters,
and a further grant of 4/5 of the water running in
the Blacksmiths fork River." Cache County 'A' Book,
1875, 253.
the boards of directors in order to assure community
benefit. The 1865 law, by splitting villages into
districts, encouraged greater decentralization of water
development. It also demanded greater democracy within
the irrigation community, as members had to vote to
approve the district's taxes, policies, and actions. 56
Given the power that the districts were granted over the
66
water within their boundaries, however, irrigators living
outside district boundaries had reduced chances of gaining
full access to water.
The next territory-wide attempt to regulate water use
and development came in 1880, when a new water law removed
the powers of water grants and district supervision from
the county court. In place of the probate judge the
county selectmen became water commissioners, charged with
adjudicating all water claims, and recording those claims
in official county document,s.57 The 1880 law recognized
that much of the water in small community streams had long
ago been claimed and put to use, but that little of it had
been measured, recorded, or in any way legally quantified.
The governmental burden shifted from one of granting water
to one of trying to formalize previous grants and
56 Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in utah
(Baltimore, 1895), 36.
57 Wells A. Hutchins and Dallin W. Jensen, The Utah
Law of Water Rights (Salt Lake City, 1965), 12.
67
adjudicate contests over water long-ago committed to
someone's ditch or someone else's mill. This divested the
county court of its authority to grant water according to
the criteria of beneficial use, and left Utahns without a
way to appropriate "new" water. 58
The 1880 water law held sway over Utah irrigators
only until 1897 when statehood brought about yet another
reformulation of policy. In the seventeen years between
1880 and 1897, however, the 1880 measure effected a
revolution in conceptions of water ownership and use, if
not in the actual irrigation practice. The revolution
exhibited a certain schizophrenia. It moved away from,
yet also affirmed, Mormon religious and community ideals.
Water was public property in pioneer Utah, its use
inseparable from the land it watered. Water rights could
not be bought and sold as private property separate from
that land. In 1880 the territorial legislature reversed
those provisions. Thereafter a water right was an
individual's private property, to be bought or sold as
such, without reference to land. 59 The text of the 1880
law read that
such [water] rights may be appurtenant to the land
58 Hutchins and Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights,
14.
59 George Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 144.
68
upon which it is used or it may be personal property,
at the option of the rightful owner of such rights
and a change in the place of use of water shall in no
manner affect the validity of any person's right to
use water ..•. 60
This provision did not radically change Utahns use of
water; irrigation practices remained much the same. 61
What changed was the structure of authority into which the
water "owner" entered when disputing a substance that had
now become his private property. Rather than community
groups presenting proposals for water use to probate
judges, individuals now turned to county selectmen, who
settled disputes over individual rights, rather than group
claims. 62
The changes brought on by the 1880 irrigation law had
their roots in the growing conflict between Utah Territory
and the U. S. federal government. Among other attempted
subversions of Mormon regional dominance, the United
states was busy curbing the powers of Utah's county
officials. The growing numbers of non-Mormons in Utah
also challenged Mormon control of water resources. It
seems plausible that the 1880 law was an attempt to assure
60 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 54.
61 Maass and Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall
Rejoice, 343.
62 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 54.
Mormons continuing control of the water by making water
into private property.63 The law switched the foundation
of water rights from a community basis to an individual
basis, but in doing so it worked toward maintaining the
status quo of community control over water.
69
The second revolution of Utah's 1880 water law, which
confirmed its schizophrenic nature, harked back to pioneer
ideals and water rights whil~ at the same time adjusting
the legal structure to the necessity of continued growth.
The 1880 law confirmed the doctrine of prior
appropriation, the rule of "first in time, first in
right." within the structure of priority rights, though,
the legislature designated two classes of rights--primary
and secondary rights--based on the volume of the river
flow. Those holding primary rights could draw water from
a stream no matter what its level of flow. Holders of
secondary rights drew water only when the river rose above
its lowest average level. M Secondary appropriators were
allowed no water once the river dropped below a certain
level. This provision opened opportunities to post-1880
settlers in areas where earlier diverters had sealed up
the use of available water, but those opportunities lasted
only as long as the excess seasonal flow. The law also
63 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 82.
M Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 228.
70
allowed holders of secondary rights to divert water during
the off-season, when primary rights were not claimed for
summer irrigation. 65 It reduced the ability of on~ group
of water users to block appropriation of excess resources
by others, and thus appeared to serve the growth and
equality of the community within the tradition of Mormon
ideals. M As Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson commented,
the idea of an absolute priority, such as that applied in
Colorado, was "incompatible" with the Mormon's
"cooperative community approach." In Utah, "the idea of
proportioning limited flows was a natural outgrowth of the
common community interest. The church could not allow
some settlers to have a full supply of water while others
were denied access to it. ,,67 This principle would be
solidly reiterated in the early twentieth century with the
first full legal adjudication of the waters of the Logan
River, which called into question the place of primary and
secondary water rights in the Mormons "cooperative
community approach" to water use.
The territorial water laws of 1865 and 1880 may have
had little actual effect on the means by which the
65 Hutchins and Jensen, Utah Law of water Rights, 36.
M FOX, "Mormon Land System," 140.
67 Maass and Anderson, ••• and the Desert Shall
Rejoice, 347.
71
individual Cache Valley farmer diverted water through his
lateral ditches to his crops, but they provided the over­arching
structure to the smaller patterns and negotiations
that surrounded those diversions. As state power grew,
the Mormon church withdrew from formal involvement in
community water use, but its ideals remained central to
that use. Most importantly, the patterns of community
thinking and behavior that it developed in its members
proved, at least in smaller villages, crucial to the ways
in which they dealt with, and thought about, water. The
structure of water use began as a religious ideal of
cooperation. In becoming a more secular process and in
adjusting itself to state laws such as those of 1865 and
1880, it maintained much of its original cast. The laws,
even when trying to break away from church-created
principles, continued to reflect community values.
When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, the larger
governmental structure continued, with legislation and new
bureaucratic institutions, to assert pressure on local
control over water. In the small towns of Cache Valley,
however, at least through 1920, the attempt to separate
legal order and community order appeared to have little
effect. Local irrigation companies, aided by a continued
abundance of water, simply adapted legal structures to
their own needs. Even when incorporating themselves into
72
new legal entities outside the church, and in using non­church
means to resolve their disputes, water users
remained inherently tied to church-created structures of
thought and action. Those structures included a
fundamental unwillingness to turn to powers outside the
immediate group for financial support, legal advice, or
legal adjudication of conflict. They included as well an
unswerving commitment to the idea that the individual
should contribute to the collective system in proportion
to his benefit from that system. And it included the
conflicts and tension inherent in a system where religious
ideals demanded both individual and community success, and
where each irrigator had to balance his contributions to
the collective with his pursuit of individual advancement.
Water in Mormon Utah flowed flow from the first
nature of the river to the second nature of the canal
systems and the village, the infrastructure that both
defined the community and provided the tapestry against
which Mormons wrestled with their goals and ideals, both
individual and collective. The community did not produce
these CUltural, water-based ideals on its own, however.
Nature played a role. This second nature of canals and
towns, like all such human-constructed second natures, was
rarely free from the vagaries of first nature, from the
unexpected complexities of its own workings, or from the
73
cultural imperatives that brought it into being.
In July of 1890, at the height of the irrigation
season, a mud slide careened down the slope of the raised
alluvial bench at the mouth of the canyon, filled in the
Logan and Richmond canal, and tore a 200 foot break in the
canal's bank. with over 200 city lots and about 2,600
acres of farmland thirsting for their due, the landholders
of the Logan and Richmond irrigation district spent a dry
three weeks repairing the damage and building a wooden
flume so that water could again reach their yards and
crops. They then spent a year wrangling with officials of
Utah state Agricultural College, a two-year-old
institution whose application of irrigation water to
farmland on top of the bench, just above the canal,
softened the soil along the sidehill, and caused the mud
slides.
In early July of 1891, a year later, it happened
again. At an emergency meeting on July 11th, district
stockholders debated their next move. James Adams, who
owned 14 acres of farmland and one city lot in the Logan
precinct of the irrigation district, declared to the
assembled group that "the reason we are here is that the
canal is broke and we want to know if all are willing to
go to work and fix it, alIso [sic] what are we going to do
with the College for destroying our Canal.,,68 The
struggle between the Logan and Richmond district and the
Agricultural College, which continued, as did the mud
slides, into the twentieth century. It provides a
microcosm of the first set of connections important to
74
water use in Mormon communities: the flow of water out of
its natural water courses and into community-managed
canals, and the conflicts over management of and
responsibility for those canals. Here, first nature--the
rich, porous soils of that land formation--impinged on the
second nature of the canal system and the farms it served,
as, for example, when two sets of irrigators attempted
simultaneous July waterings of land on top of the bench
and below the canal.
This particular conflict also emphasized some
important features of the canal systems: their generally
unplanned nature, at least in relation to each other;
their technological simplicity; their low level of
capitalization. The stories of the Logan and Richmond
Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the
two major irrigation thoroughfares that I will examine
here, illustrate the flow of water through Mormon
68 Minutes, 11 July 1891, Logan 'and Richmond
Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 1,
Bound MS 28, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT
[hereafter Logan and Richmond I], 414.
75
communities, beginning with the initial flow from a
"natural" structure into a community structure, from first
to second nature.
76
CHAPTER IV
GETTING WATER: COMMUNITY SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE
The struggle within and among Mormon communities to
harness water for shared and individual purposes took
place not on the level of territorial water law (though
these laws certainly played a role), but on the level of
day-to-day and season-to-season water use. The tensions
rooted in the struggle to put water to God's purpose grew
out of the mundane, and often muddled proces's of
appropriating, measuring, distributing, paying for, and
controlling water. Through these processes, irrigators
measured their share of the community resource, and
defined their individual contributions to the upkeep of
the ditches. At its core, irrigation was a system of
exchange between the individual and the community. Canal
companies, representing the water community, based the
rate of exchange on a direct proportion. Everyone gave to
the system in proportion to the amount of water they
needed. The simplicity of that system was confounded,
though, by the patriarchal nature of the society which
gave small groups of leaders greater power over community­regulated
resources, and by every individual's struggle to
better his family's condition within the community. The
77
ideal of the system was complicated as well by the ill­defined,
always-changing exchanges themselves, and by
nature itself. water flowed downhill, from one geographic
point to another, and thus different water users,
upstream, and downstream, no matter how democratic their
intentions, bore unequal relationships to one another, and
to the canal.
The conflicts that arose out of these exchanges
between individual and community prove that Mormons did
fight over water. Less obvious, however, and more subtly
apparent in' the inner workings of Logan River canal
collectives, were the ways and the reasons that they
fought over water, and the routes they took in surmounting
the barriers raised by those conflicts. The need to
manage water kept the problems of community purpose and
individual salvation at the center of daily life. Water,
for this reason and others, took on powers and meanings
well beyond its salutary effects on agricultural
production. The resolution of water conflicts continued,
into the twentieth century, to reflect the insularity and
~ solidarity of early Mormon villages.
Although the 1880 water law made it possible to re­define
a water right as a piece of private property rather
than as a community-granted, church-granted, or God­granted
usufruct, Cache Valley irrigators in the last two
78
decades of the 19th century defined and dealt with water
in very practical, non-legislative ways. The community
used water in myriad ways, to power mills, water stock,
cook, clean, and, eventually, generate electricity. The
pre-eminent use of canal water, however, was irrigation of ~
food crops. The process by which water was channeled to
crops, rather than legal definitions of water right,
dominated collective understanding of how water should be
measured and distributed. The result of this agricultural
mindset was a fluidity of exchange in which irrigators
traded labor, grain, and cash for water according to
mutually agreed-upon rates of exchange. The leadership of
the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, for instance,
spent much of its time administering these various
arrangements, recording the amount of labor and cash that
each member contributed to the collective, and attempting
to regulate the amount of water taken in return. The
landowners under the canal met annually to vote on
standards of eXChange, to set wage rates, yearly tax
assessments, and haggle over the worth of everyone's work
and water. Not everyone in the community was required to
contribute labor, cash, or crops, however. widows and men
in "poor circumstances" were provided with water tax-free
by the community, a practice which underscored the extent
to which the irrigation district was a ' community, rather
79
than commercial institution. 1
In March 1879 Robert and James Meikle of Smithfield,
who were not at the time landholders in the Logan and
Richmond Irrigation District, but would by 1884 own 28
acres between them, petitioned the district trustees for
use of water from the canal based on labor they had done
on the canal in 1865, 1866, and 1867, over ten years
earlier. The trustees figured out that the Meikles labor
had been worth $133, which entitled them to enough water
for six and a half acres of land. 2 Thus labor on a canal,
even if accomplished long ago, remained the key means of
access to water, the immediate fruit of that labor.
Robert and James Meikle may not have needed water from the
Logan and Richmond Canal in 1865, but when they did need
it later, their labor guaranteed them that right.
Although different methods of measuring irrigation water
sprang up everywhere as more and more claimants and
regulators sought to divide river flows, here the volume
of water remained, for the time being, measurable only by
1 Log~n and Richmond I, 5 March 1881, 87.
2 Logan and Richmond I, 8 March 1879. water taxes and
acreages cited, and calculations of average payments
and number of acres owned, are derived from Logan and
Richmond accounts for the years 1879 and 1884, found
in the first volume of records, pp. 4-24, 188-215,
and the years 1891 and 1896, found in the second
volume of Logan and Richmond records, pp. 2-20, 172-
93.
the area of the fields it could irrigate. The "water of
six and a half acres," was clearly measured in terms of
agricultural land.
80
In 1879, then, the Logan and Richmond landholders
thought of water in terms of their fields, and in terms of
the crops those fields produced. In October of that year
the annual stockholders meeting bogged down in a debate
over the price to be accorded a bushel of grain in the
paying of annual water assessments. The water taxes were
set at 10 cents per acre of agricultural land, and 20
cents per city lot. After "considerable discussion" the
group agreed on a price of 75 cents for a bushel of wheat,
in the paying of water assessments. 3 A landholder with
one city lot and 20 acres of land, owing $2.20 to the
district for the year, could pay in cash, in labor, or in
grain--just under three bushels. Water users paid water
assessments based not on the actual volume of water they
used, but on the amount of land and the kind of land they
watered. Water was not really taxable apart from its use
for irrigation; it was part and parcel of the way in which
it was put to use. When irrigators looked at and thought
of water they saw water, certainly, but they also saw
their own labor, their investment in the land and the
community, and they saw grain. with assessments paid in
3 Logan and Richmond I, 13 October 1879, 33.
81
grain, the exchange came full circle. The product of the
water itself--the crops--could pay for the water. Any
system of exchange, however, that attempted to balance
water on one hand, and land, labor, and grain on the
other, all of which had different values in different
seasons and years, generated its share of confusion.
Questions of how to measure and distribute water came
up again and again in the 1880s and 1890s. For Robert and
James Meikle, the Logan and Richmond district trustees
measured water according to acres of land. How much water
that actually involved was never specified, but rather
regulated by the farmers and watermasters, according to
commonly held conceptions of hoW much water was needed for
each acre of crops. The standard unit of distribution was
the "irrigating stream," a somewhat vague volume
considered to be the largest free flowing stream of water
that a single irrigator (with a shovel) could distribute
over his crops.4 In June of 1882, Smithfield's
watermaster complained that Hyde Park, whose irrigators
got water before it got to Smithfield, were cutting
through the canal banks and taking more than their share.
The trustees discussed the issue and, in an attempt to
even out the distribution of water, "ordered that the
4 Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 109.
82
water be divided so as to give each one hundred acres a
stream all through the district. tls Presumably, this water
would be distributed on a set schedule, everyone or two
weeks. This attempt to match specific volumes of water
with specific acreages indicated that such co-ordination
required special effort, and that the irrigators'
conception of equal distribution was based in the idea
that a given amount of water was best measured by the
amount of land it irrigated. The Logan and Richmond
district account books kept records of water use according
to the number of acres and number of city lots each
subscriber watered, and assessed water taxes accordingly.
Actual volumes of water rarely entered into the
proceedings. This agriculturally-based system of
measurement would change, however.
In October of 1879., Thomas X. Smith, the Logan city
Watermaster, and a local ward bishop, approached the Logan
and Richmond Irrigation District on behalf of Logan City
with a request for a grant of year-round water rights to
one square foot of the canal's water, a specific volume
equivalent to 100 acres of water right. The agreement
that followed signaled a slight shift in the
inseparability of water and land. In its contract with
Logan City, the irrigation district required the city to
S Logan and Richmond I, 24 June 1882, 118-19.
83
pay taxes on 100 acres of water right, even though Logan
city was not watering 100 acres of land but rather
supplying its residents with water for various other
purposes. This deal also signaled a geographic division
between water users that changed community relationships.
The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District was taking form
as an entity separate from the town of Logan itself. The
Logan and Richmond canal flowed only through part of
Logan, and then out of Logan, to serve other communities.
The community of Logan residents and the community of
irrigators along the Logan and Richmond Canal emerged as
distinct factions with distinct interests and distinct
ways of using the same water source. Growing demands for
water thus complicated the accepted systems of exchange
for water, and increased the chances for conflict.
The intricate details of neighborly water-sharing
realm, whether between individuals or villages, required a
constant hammering out, as irrigators sought fair
solutions to the dilemmas posed by clashes between the
river itself and the uses to which they put it. In
December of 1896 members of the Smithfield Precinct
challenged a district by-law that directed Hyde Park water
users to pay an additional ten percent on their annual
taxes, and smithfield water users an additional twenty
percent. Proponents of the extra tax held that the canal
84
had longer to travel to supply water to the towns farther
north, and thus those towns should contribute a greater
proportion to the canal's upkeep. This challenged the
cherished system of directly proportionate water exchange.
By May of 1899 James Cantwell, long-time representative of
smithfield water users, reported that his village planned
a lawsuit to challenge the 20% "local expenses" tax. 6 The
suit materialized the following December, with Smithfield
claiming that the by-laws, along with the extra local
taxes, had been drafted by the wrong party. The towns
came to an out-of-court agreement however, and the
trustees agreed to draft a new set of by-laws, eliminating
the offensive taxes. 7
Despite the seeming prevalence of inter-town water
disputes, the majority of conflicts described in
irrigation district account books, and in the literature
of local water history, demonstrate that much of the
tension involved in district administration arose from
struggles over the individual water users responsibilities
to the collective infrastructure, and the various canal
companies' . contributions and responsibilities to its
6 Minutes, 16 May 1899, Logan and Richmond Irrigation
Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 2, Bound MS
29, Utah state University Library, Logan Utah
[hereafter Logan and Richmond II], 277; Logan and
Richmond II, 25 February 1899, 272-73.
7 Logan and Richmond II, 4 December 1899, 286.
85
individual members. In 1887 a legal conflict arose
concerning the Logan Irrigation District, the district
surrounding the Logan and Benson Canal, built in 1860.
Farmers in the tiny outlying village of Benson had dug an
extension to the original canal to serve their fields.
The trustees of the Logan Irrigation District took no
responsibility for the canal extension or the distribution
of water from it.
By 1887 the Benson irrigators found themselves deeply
frustrated by internal battles over individual water
rights. In 1898 they sued to force the Logan Irrigation
District to acknowledge the Benson extension as part of
their canal and take over its administration. 8 In doing
so, they turned to a higher, but wholly community based,
collective power to mediate individual conflicts, a common
pattern in Mormon village life. The local court denied
this request, asserting that the Benson farmers
"constructed the Benson extension to the canal without any
suggestion or aid from the Logan farmers, while the Logan
section was constructed by all in common. ,,9 This followed
8 George L. Swendsen, "Appropriation of water from
Logan River," in Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigation
Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of
Agriculture Office of Experiment stations Bulletin
No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 312.
9 Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan
River," 312.
86
the Mormon community rationale that the labor involved in
canal construction or maintenance was the only true tie to
that canal, and the only tie that carried rights to and
obligations toward use of that canal. The state supreme
court, however, overturned the local decision, stating
that the trustees of an irrigation district cannot
arbitrarily set limits on its services within the
geographic boundaries of the district. tO within the area
designated as a water community, the community was
obligated to meet the needs of all of its members, at
least to a certain point.
These issues of individual and community obligations
arose at different times in different forms. Since
members of each precinct had shared certain interests,
petitions to the trustees often took the form of
collective demands. At the annual landowners meeting of
December 1894, William Hyde of Hyde Park suggested that
the votes to elect the board be cast by precinct. James
Adams of Logan countered with a move to give each
landowner one vote. Rasmus Nielsen pointed out that
according to law, they were bound to vote according to
acreage watered under the canal, and the group agreed to
to Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan
River," 312.
87
do SO.l1 This debate concerning how each individual was
to represent himself within the group, how he measured his
power in collective decision making, demonstrated, to some
degree, the basic hierarchy at work. The individual water
user was not to be considered merely a member of his
irrigation precinct, nor as a voter equal to all other
voters in the district. The village, or community, was
not considered capable of representing each individual's
interest, nor was each individual's interest considered
equal. The established practice of voting by acreage gave
each water user power over group decisions according to
his degree of interest, the amount of land he had to water
with the resources controlled by the group. This affirmed
the tradition of the individual/community exchange
governed by direct proportion.
The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District's
traditional system of exchange for water was complicated
in the 1890s by the possibility of re-constituting the
canal as a corporate stock company. The struggle to come
to a communal decision to incorporate the irrigation
district began in 1882, and waxed and waned for many
years. It came to a head at several points, including the
winter of 1894-95. At that time, out of concern to place
the organization on firm legal ground, and follow the
11 Logan and Richmond II, 3 December 1894, 123.
88
letter of the law, the landowners voted to incorporate.
This decision was followed however, by a long debate over
the method by which to distribute stock in the new
corporation, whether by "Dollars and cents expended on the
Canal" or "according to waterright pre Acreage as shown on
the Books of the Company. ,,12 Though the argument that
followed ended as the majority of attenders wandered out
of the meeting, it demonstrated that the question of what
gave the individual water user rights to interest in the
company--his individual contributions in labor and cash,
or the amount of land he needed watered--remained an
issue.
A year later, in January of 1895, the landowners
abandoned the idea of a stock company and unanimously
voted to maintain their current status, to legally
organize themselves as an irrigation district. 13 In the
final decision they rejected the sUbstitution of an
exchange system based on financial stock in favor of their
traditional system of taxes and communal labor. The re­casting
of water rights as shares in a corporation would
have constituted a further abstraction of a natural
entity--water--into a financial entity. That the Logan
and Richmond District turned away from that abstraction
12 Logan and Richmond II, 4 January 1895, 125.
13 Logan and Richmond II, 11 January 1895, 126.
89
pointed to their favoring of the more concrete, hands-on,
local administration provided by the irrigation district.
It underlined as well the cultural importance of these
exchanges based on labor and land.
similar debates and conflicts over water use plagued
the water users under the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield
Canal, the third and highest of the Logan canals running
north from the canyon. The Logan, Hyde Park, and
smithfield began as a private, for-profit enterprise. The
challenges of diverting water from the river in the canyon
itself and running it through a canal carved in a ledge in
the canyon wall proved too much for the initial investors.
In the early 1880s a community organization took over,
completed construction, and began operations as an
incorporated cooperative irrigation company by the end of
the decade.
The articles of incorporation of the Logan, Hyde
Park, and smithfield declared a capital stock of $20,000,
consisting of 4000 shares sold at $5 each. The initial
subscribers were required to pay for only 10% of their
stock in order to have the corporation acknowledged by the
county court, which retained authority over canal
incorporation. Cash played a larger role as the arbiter
of water use, but initially it remained secondary to the
standard currencies of canal finance--Iabor, crops, and
90
water. In the first year of operation, the canal
directors granted credits in corporate stock to irrigators
who had worked to complete the construction. Thus
stockholders gained further shares through their labor and
non-stockholders earned water rights in the traditional
Mormon way, by helping to finish and repair the ditch.
Laborers were often paid half of their wages in cash and
half in stock. w
Despite the new language of shares and stock, the
Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield remained a small, local
operation. The trustees, or board of directors, reported
the net worth of the company in February 1891 as
consisting of 40 acres of land, .a cooking stove, four and
a half barrels of cement, a tent, some tools, and a dump
cart. The total cash value of these items amounted to
just over $500.15 The inflow of tax money and .outflow of
cash for materials and labor left the corporation with
little in the way of liquid capital. Though the canal
itself was worth about $14,000, wealth in and of itself
14 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal Company
Minutes and Account Book, Bound MS 26, Utah State
University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan, Hyde
Park, and Smithfield], 10 February 1890, 1 March
1890, 15 March 1890, 39-45.
15 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 21 February
1891, 73.
was neither a corporate goal, nor a reality.~
stockholders voted their shares in company business, and
paid for their water at a lower rate than non­shareholders.
In 1890 shareholders paid 12 1/2 cents an
91
acre to water farm land, and $1.00 for city lots, compared
to the 40 cents per acre and $1.50 per city lot paid by
non-shareholders. Shareholders, of course, held first
rights to available water.
Though the owning of stock distinguished members from
non-members, and thus served as a criteria for full
participation in this particular water community, all
irrigators paid water taxes according to acres and lots
watered. The old standards of exchange remained very much
in evidence. The need for and use of water was based on
land and crops, as usual, and not on corporate status.
The advent of corporate stock, a measure of water-community
membership and, indeed of water, however, was
new to irrigators, and required some adjustment. Shares
in the corporation could be earned, bought, and sold with
no reference to the land or the water they represented.
For the first few years, shareholders wavered over
what in fact distinguished them from other water users-­those
with more stock, those with less, and those with
16 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 23 February
1891, 75.
92
none. Board President Hyrum Maughan raised this issue to
the presiding group in March 1892. -He "suggested the
propriety of having some relation established between the
shares held and the water used by stockholders ..•. ,,17
Maughan felt that they should review the records and find
the total amount expended on "cleaning, repairing, and
enlarging the canal from the beginning of the present
ownership .... ,,18 After figuring as well the amount that
water users had paid in taxes, they could ascertain who
was using less or more than their share. A similar
question arose the next week, when a shareholder asked
that some standard be set for "how much waterrright was
required to water an acre of land or rather how much stock
it was necessary to hold to water one acre."~ Irrigator
Marrinus Anderson added that "I think that if we knew how
much water right was required for 5 or 10 acres use [we]
could govern ourselves accordingly."w The measure of,
and relationships among, land, water, time, and corporate
stock remained mysterious and confused. Anderson added
17 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 8 March 1892,

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All Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies, School of
1-1-1992
Nature's Second Course: Water Culture in the
Mormon Communities of Cache Valley, Utah,
1860-1916
Kathryn T. Morse
Utah State University
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Recommended Citation
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All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1248.
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Copyright: Kathryn Taylor Morse 1992
All Rights Reserved
NATURE'S SECOND COURSE: WATER CULTURE
IN THE MORMON COMMUNITIES OF
CACHE VALLEY, UTAH, 1860-1916
by
Kathryn T. Morse
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Approved:
Hakr 'Profess'or
Committee Member
of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
Committee H~ber
Dean of Graduate studies
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY
Logan, Utah
1992
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Everyone who contributed to this project displayed
impressive tact, patience, and good humor in awaiting its
belated completion. Thanks go to Prof. Chas Peterson, who
introduced me to the study of Mormon community, helped to
define, and then re-define the topic, and provided a
crucial reading of the first draft. Prof. Carol O'Connor
assisted with my struggles to re-define the topic as well.
Prof. Clyde Milner not only gave the thesis its title, but
also provided skillful advice and encouragement at all
stages. In the context of another project, Prof. Len
Rosenband helped me grapple with 19th-century Mormon
diaries, a skill which proved crucial to this thesis.
Prof. Tom Lyon served on my thesis committee and helped
with a careful reading of the first draft. Carolyn
Fullmer and everyone at the Utah State History Department
helped with the final details. Prof. Bill Cronon of Yale
University chipped in a long conversation on various
aspects of the thesis topic on the bus ride from Tacoma to
Mt. Rainier and back at the 1989 WHA conference. My
formal intellectual debts to Prof. Cronon are evident in
the text. Profs. Richard White and John Findlay of the
University of Washington kindly and tactfully encouraged
me to finish this project, and supported my efforts to do
so long distance. I am grateful to all.
iii
A. J. Simmonds, Brad Cole, and the staff of Special
Collections at the Merrill Library graciously allowed me
free run of their collections and helped me locate
important documents, for which I thank them. All of the
documents in this work come from their impressive archive,
and my work would have been impossible without their
support. utah state University provided financial
assistance for my studies through its support of the
Western History Association editorial fellowship program,
a seeley-Hinckley scholarship in 1989, and through a
summer thesis completion scholarship in 1990.
All of my friends in Logan, including Prof. Anne
Butler, Jay Butler, Lisa Godfrey, L. J. Godfrey, Catherine
Milner, Charlie Milner, Clyde Milner, Chris Mitchell,
Carol O'Connor, Grace ott, Ross Peterson, Jane Reilly,
Renee Sentilles, Ona Siporin, and Barbara stewart provided
advice, support, and love throughout this project, as well
as recreational diversions and plenty of free meals. I
thank them all. I am grateful to my parents, steve and
Deanne Morse, and my housemates, Jerri Hoskyn and Cindy
Cresap, for day-to-day and week-to-week encouragement.
My personal connection to the stretch of Cache Valley
watered by the irrigation systems discussed here grows out
of hikes and bike rides around the valley, and from bike
rides from my various homes in Logan to the various homes
iv
of my good friends Lisa and L.J. Godfrey in North Logan
and Smithfield. It was in passing through that irrigated,
beautiful landscape, in all seasons, at all hours, to join
them for barbecues and movie-fests, that I first grasped
the powerful sense of place that Mormon communities
created in Cache Valley through the practice of irrigated
agriculture. I thank Lisa and L. J. for sharing that
place with me.
Kathryn Morse
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
~ClCllO~EI)(;~ENT~ •..•••...•••.•...••.•••••••••........•.. ii
LIST OF FIG'URES •...•.•••.......•.•.••....••••..•••...... vi
ABSTRACT ..............•.....•••••••..••••...•••....••.. vii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ....••.•••.••••...•••••...•.•....•..... 1
II. NAT'URE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH ••.•••• · •.••.•.•.... 13
III. FROM LO(;AN RIVER TO LO(;AN TOWN ••••••••.••••.....•. 33
IV. (;ETTIN(; WATER: COMMUNITY SYST~S OF EXCHAN(;E •...• 76
V. WATER AND POWER: PATRIARCHY, (;EO(;RAPHY, AND
HIERARCHIES OF WATER USE •.•••••••••••.••••...••... 99
VI. STRIKIN(; A BALANCE: NAT'URAL AND CULTURAL CYCLES
OF WATER USE IN MORMON COMMUNITIES •••••••••..••.. 131
VII. WATER IN THE STREETS: VILLA(;E LOT IRRI(;ATION .••. 174
VIII. CONCLUSION .•.•••.•••••••••••••..•••••......•..... 209
BIBLIO(;RAPHY •••••••...•••..••••••••••••••••••••••••.•.. 218
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-
Idaho .......................................... 5
2 Cache Valley Basin with Inset ................... 41
2A Inset of Map 2. Logan River Canals .............. 42
3 Land Ownership Along Logan and Richmond Canal .. l04
4 Call Decree Chart .............................. 166
5 Logan River water Distribution Schedules .... 169-71
6 Logan City with Boundaries of Seventh Ward ..... 186
7 Detail of Seventh Ward, with Inset ............. 195
8 city Lot Arrangements in Salt Lake City ........ 201
ABSTRACT
Nature's Second Course: water Culture
in the Mormon Communities of
Cache Valley, Utah, 1860-1916
by
Kathryn T. Morse, Master of Arts
Utah State University, 1992
Major Professor: Dr. Clyde A. Milner II
Department: History
vii
.Nineteenth-century Mormon settlers in Utah combined a
unique set of religious beliefs with a fervent agrarianism
and a strong sense of community. They encountered a
specific arid environment along the Wasatch Front. A
distinctive cultural set of irrigation institutions and
practices developed out of the complex interchanges
between nature and culture in Cache Valley, Utah, between
1860 and 1916. The structure of water flow, and conflicts
over water rights and responsibilities, reflected the
fundamental tensions within Mormon communities between
individual gain and collective progress; it also reflected
the patriarchal essence of Mormon culture.
The season-to-season workings of irrigation
institutions that distributed water from the Logan River,
whether large irrigation districts or neighborhood canal
viii
cooperatives, showed how Mormon communities developed
systems of exchange for water that allowed each individual
irrigator to take water in direct proportion to the amount
of labor, cash, or crops he contributed to the group's
collective construction and upkeep of canals. The
democratic nature of these exchanges, however, were
tempered by natural hierarchies inherent in the geography
of water canals, and by community hierarchies of power. A
small group of elite town fathers held most of the
responsibility for irrigation administration, and used
their influence -in disputes over water. Those town
fathers also tended to own more land than other
irrigators. They often owned valuable land in proximity
to the canals themselves.
Between settlement in 1860 and the Call Decree in
1916, Logan River irrigators worked together to formulate
a water distribution system that allowed for both the
growth of local communities and for continued adherence to
the basic religious principles on which the communities
were founded. They also struggled to follow seasonal
cycles of water use that fit within the natural cycles of
the rise and fall of the water level in the river.
Whether at the level of the high-line canal, the city
block, or the family garden, Mormon water systems
constituted an interesting example of the ways in which
ix
culture and the environment come together to shape natural
resource use, especially in the arid regions of the
American west.
(234 pages)
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
"I had my garden spot surveyed this day[.] Agnes was
very sick."l So wrote Mormon settler and diarist John
Borrowman on Tuesday, May 28, 1850. As of that date,
Borrowman, a Scottish immigrant, had lived in Salt Lake
City for just over a year and a half, and had been married
for sixteen months. Given the crushing load of labor
involved in establishing a home, clearing, fencing,
plowing, and watering his land, and contributing to
community projects, it is no wonder that Borrowman kept
his . journal entries short. His brief words revealed much
about his world, however. They spoke particularly to the
crucial place of irrigation water in that world.
Borrowman summed up the following day with equal brevity:
"I watered my land this morning[i] William Park was born
at a quarter to three 0' clock in the morning. ,,2 The order
of his comments is telling. Though his wife had been in
labor the previous day and most of the night, and had
given birth to his first child, William Park Borrowman,
I John Borrowman Journal, Extracts 1846-1860, 28 May
1850, TS, Joel E. Ricks Collection of Transcriptions,
vol. 3, Utah State University Library, Logan, UT.
2 Borrowman Journal, 29 May 1850.
early that morning, he noted first that he had irrigated
his farmland.
2
John Borrowman's conflation of those two events, the
birth of his son and the watering of his land, spoke to
the importance of irrigation water in his family's life,
and in the life of early Mormon communities in utah. Not
only did the watering of land merit frequent mention in
daily records of individual and collective activities, but
any work involving water and water ditches got top billing
over young William Borrowman's tersely heralded arrival.
The contrasting of these two events in a simple record of
a single day pointed as· well to the complementary nature
of the two acts. In bringing a child into the world of
Salt Lake city in 1850, and in bringing water to their
newly acquired farm plot, John and Agnes Borrowman took
two closely linked steps toward the fulfillment of their
earthly mission. That mission was to create a Mormon
civilization in the valleys at the foot of the Wasatch
Mountains. They had to people what seemed an endless
wilderness with like-minded servants of God, and they had
to support their families with the resources that God had
provided them in this new Zion.
To give the watering of land and a birth equal
weight, then, was no outlandish literary act. Water held
a crucial place in the Mormon physical and spiritual
3
world. It symbolized the baptism of new members into the
spiritual community, and it made food production possible.
Folklorist Barre Toelken, in his work on the folklore of
water in Mormon Utah, notes that as in the irrigation of
an arid land, "so in baptism is water a mediator between
life and death, a concept richly dramatized in many Mormon
legends. "3
water held great meaning and power in 19th- and early
20th-century Mormon communities, as it does in the
present. The structure of water flow in those communities
reflected the fundamental tensions between individual gain
and collective progress, both spiritual and material, that
underlay Mormon culture. It reflected as well the
patriarchal essence of that culture. Those two components
of the Mormon world, the constant struggle for balance
between the individual and the community, and the rule of
the fathers, in family, community, and religion, were as
evident in the social mechanisms of water use as in any
other aspect of community life.
The management of irrigation water by local canal
companies provided a forum for expressions of the purpose
and meaning of Mormon community, and of the place of that
community in both the physical environment and the
3 Barre Toelken, "The Folklore of water in the Mormon
West'," Northwest Folklore 7 (Spring 1989): 10.
4
spiritual universe. w~ter and its management were crucial
not only to the material survival and prosperity of the
town, but also to the residents' understanding of their
individual and collective roles in the fulfillment of the
Mormon mission. This thesis will explore the connections
between water, religion, community, and nature along the
Logan River in Cache Valley, Utah, from settlement in 1860
through the 1916 community-wide adjudication of water
rights [see Figure 1]. The events of those years are
informed by both earlier and later stages of Mormon
settlement, as evident in John Borrowman's journal, and
thus I consider examples of water use from widely varying
moments of Utah's settlement. Though the management and
infrastructure of water use changed over this 1860-1916
time-span, and continued to change thereafter, the Logan
irrigators' tenacious commitment to traditional practices
and institutions during this period indicated the cultural
importance of a uniquely Mormon way of distributing water.
In claiming that water held "cultural importance" in
Mormon Utah, that water use was itself "cultural," I seek
more than historical proof of the obvious. I investigate
rather the detailed and subtle ways in which culture--the
ever-shifting mixture of religious belief, social and
economic structure, material subsistence, family and
community life, divisions of labor, written and oral
....
'1
\A q, ~~
Figure 1. Erwin Raisz, Map of Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho,
from The History of a Valley: Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho,
ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956).
~.
01
6
traditions, and worldview--shaped the use of natural
resources. All natural resource use is cultural, but the
connections between nature and culture, and the ways in
which culture mediates between human communities and the
natural environment, vary widely, even within a single
region or state. A detailed consideration of these
connections from a cultural standpoint, as a case study of
the interactions between nature and culture, is justified
by the unique world of Mormon water use.
Over the last few decades, growing numbers of
historians have turned their attention to the place of
water in the American West, and in the Mormon West as
well. 4 Donald Worster's 1985 book, Rivers of Empire:
water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West, is
perhaps the most provocative of these recent works. It is
4 The list is extensive, but includes: Robert G.
Dunbar, Forging New Rights in Western Waters
(Lincoln, 1983); Norris Hundley, jr., Water and the
West: The Colorado River and the Politics of Water
in the West (Berkeley, 1975); William L. Kahrl, Water
and Power: The Conflict Over Los Angeles' Water
Sqpply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley, 1982); Arthur
Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ..• and the Desert
Shall .Rejoice: Conflict, Growth, and Justice in Arid
Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Donald J. Pisani,
From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation
Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931
(Berkeley, 1984); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The
American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York,
1986); William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid
America (New York, 1900); and Donald Worster, Rivers
of Empire; water, Aridity & The Growth of The
American West (New York, 1985).
in part a moral condemnation of the destruction that the
hydraulic society of the modern West has visited upon
rivers that were once natural systems, and upon
communities that once felt some connection to those
rivers. Worster defines three modes of societal water
control: the local SUbsistence mode; the agrarian state
mode; and the one currently operating in most western
communities, the capitalist state mode. s Worster
characterizes the early Mormon SUbsistence mode as an
admirable monument to religious zeal, as an example of a
7
good fit between ideology and environment, and as evidence
of an underlying, dictatorial church hierarchy. Mormon
water systems were certainly all of those things, but they
were much more as well. Worster only skims the surface of
what is to be learned from a close examination of the
local SUbsistence mode of water control in utah. This is
not surprising, as neither utah nor SUbsistence water use
are his main topic in Rivers of Empire. His discussion of
the capitalist state mode of water development, however,
by providing a contrast to local SUbsistence water
systems, underlines much that is important about water in
Mormon communities.
The West's hydraulic society, according to Worster,
S Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water. Aridity &
The Growth of the American West (New York, 1985), 31.
8
is built on "a sharply alienating, intensely managerial
relationship with nature. ,,6 That relationship with nature
is evident in the infrastructure of dams, canals, and
aqueducts, monolithic concrete fortresses which proclaim
humankind's domination of, and separation from, the
natural resources that support their consumer-oriented,
socially divided culture. Water in these canals and
behind these dams is not part of a natural system, but
rather, in Worster's words, "simplified, abstracted water,
rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to
raise food, fill pipes, and make money.,,7 In evoking the
profound alienation he perceives between the human
community and water, Worster describes the Friant-Kern
Canal, which waters the agribusiness empire of
California's Central Valley:
Along the Friant-Kern Canal, as along many others
like it, tall chain-link fences run on either side,
sealing the ditch off from stray dogs, children,
fishermen (there are no fish anyway), solitary
thinkers, lovers, swimmers, loping hungry coyotes,
migrating turtles, indeed from all of nature and
human life ..•• 8
At its core, then, Rivers of Empire asserts that the
way in which any community in an arid environment controls
its distribution of water reflects its social and
6 Worster, Rivers' of Empire,S.
7 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S.
8 Worster, Rivers of Empire,S.
9
political structure, and the fundamental tenets of its
attitudes toward nature. In Worster's words, "the social
order, the shape of western community ••• is reflected in
the waters of the ditch. ,,9 That assertion, and those
reflections, are nowhere more evident than in the Logan
River communities of Cache Valley between 1860 and 1916.
The following chapters will explore the social order
reflected in the workings of village ditches, first from
the wide-angled perspective of the Mormon spiritual world­view,
then from the nearer vantage of the season-to-season
workings of two major canal companies, and finally from a
close-up look at water use on village house lots and in
gardens.
While Mormon water use was a thoroughly cultural
activity, it involved nature as well. The development of
irrigation institutions and distributions systems that met
the agricultural demands of the villages involved a
constant struggle to fit those demands into the limits of
the water supplied by the Logan River. The Euro-American
settlers who first diverted the waters of the Logan River
alienated and abstracted that river from its "first" or
original "state of nature," just as other westerners
wrought havoc on the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia,
and Colorado.
9 Worster, River of Empire, 5.
10
Cache Valley Mormons also "commoditized" irrigation
water, bringing it within a system of economic exchange
that defined and re-defined its value by different, and
changing, criteria. The Utahns turned the river into
networks of canals, and attempted to alter the annual
cycles of natural water flow to match the cycles of
agricultural demand and community water use. In Logan,
Utah, however, this creation of a "second" nature, a
second cycle of water flow, took place on a much less
disruptive scale than elsewhere in the west. Mormon
culture and the Cache Valley environment were different
from other western cultures and places. The Mormon system
of re-distributing river flow across time and space was
thus distinctive. water in small Mormon communities was
not "rigidly separated" from the human communities through
which it ran by artificial cycles of dam-released flow, by
steel and concrete, or by intellectual constructs of water
as commodity or as capital. The system of exchange worked
out by Logan water users--what and when they traded
amongst themselves for water--proved less rigid, less
cash-based, less technologically complex, than those of
other, and later, western communities. Mormons certainly
foisted intellectual constructs onto their water supply,
and certainly altered its cycles of flow, but they were
constructs and cycles of a different kind, based on their
11
drive for material success within the boundaries of
community tenets. Far from alienating water from its own
"nature" or from human society, Mormon settlers welcomed
irrigation water into their communities, where it flowed
in open streams down ditches and gutters, through yards
and parks, providing long corridors of green vegetation,
and lofting islands of cool air into the summer heat. The
Latter-day saints filled their towns with the sound of
running water.
water, at least in some utah communities, had a
meaning far different from that of water in other parts of
the American west. This much is clear in the contrast
between village canals and the hydraulic nightmare Worster
describes in California. Where Rivers of Empire tells the
story of Big Twentieth-Century Water, this thesis examines
a smaller, more obscure and out-of-the-way genre of
western water history, one of small communities using a
small river to small ends. Water formed crucial, dynamic
connections between members of those communities, and
between the community and the natural environment. Those
connections to water grew out of the unique culture that
the Latter-day Saints developed in reaction to a specific
western environment. Water joined them to nature and to
each other in ways which evidenced not a timeless harmony
between "man" and "nature," but rather the disjunctions
12
and tensions inherent in every attempt to shape nature to
human designs, as well as the tensions within human
communities created by such shapings. This discussion of
Mormon water-use, then, is at its base a cultural study,
an attempt to sketch the ways in which culture is both
shaped by and reflected in the use of natural resources,
and the ways in which culture can in turn influence social
decisions concerning nature as a resource.
13
CHAPTER II
NATURE AND WATER IN MORMON UTAH
In the villages of Cache Valley, Utah, water was part
both of a natural system--the river--and a social,
religious, and even spiritual system--Mormon culture.
That culture combined elements of Jeffersonian agrarianism
with a peculiar brand of millennial fervor. To find the
place of water in this spiritual universe, one must follow
its flow into and out of Mormon agrarianism.
As the vanguard of Euro-American settlement in the
Great Basin, the Utah migrants of the 1840s, '50s, and
'60s brought with them the basic tenets of the American
agrarian myth. Like other Americans, they held that the
Biblical injunction to "replenish the earth, and subdue
it" could best be fulfilled though agriculture. Through
farming, God's true servants could remake the New World
into a second garden of Eden. In his late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century writings, Thomas Jefferson
combined Biblical agrarianism with the Enlightenment­inspired
conviction that only the yeoman farmer, dependent
solely on the soil and his own initiative, could properly
participate in a democratic society. Jefferson wrote that
"[t]hose who labor in the earth are the chosen people of
14
God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has
made His peculiar deposit for sUbstantial and genuine
v1. rt ue .... ,,1
This agrarian myth prevailed throughout America in
the 19th century. It had particular power in regard to
the American West, as established by Henry Nash smith in
his classic work Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth. smith expanded Jefferson's general agrarian
myth to include the "myth of the garden," the idea that
the transformation of the continent should result in a
settled pastoral landscape. "The master symbol of the
garden," smith wrote, "embraced a cluster of metaphors
expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor
in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the
idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian
weapon, the sacred plow. ,,2 The Latter-day saints adhered
to this garden-myth with a tenacity unmatched by any other
group of Euro-American settlers. 3 They focused on the
canonization and fulfillment of agriculture ideals with
1 As quoted in Donald Henriques Dyal, "The Agrarian
Values of Mormonism: A Touch of the Mountain Sod"
(Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University, 1980), 3.
2 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West
as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 123.
3 See Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 136,
on the Mormon affinity for the "controlling images"
of the agrarian myth.
unprecedented energy. Generic American agrarianism
deteriorated into a fuzzy secularity as the 19th century
progressed, but Utah Mormons harnessed the fervor of
puritanism, and of 1840s revivalism, to propel agrarian
beliefs to new heights of piety. Historian Charles S.
15
Peterson described Mormon agrarian belief as "[c]osmic in
its breadth," a conviction that:
Man and the world in which he lived were in a wicked
and ungodly state. The redemption of the righteous
was the first imperative and implied the second, the
redemption of the earth. 4
Brigham Young, who led the Mormon migration to Utah,
with his fellow Mormon leaders incorporated this version
of Christian agrarianism into scriptural texts. Their
writings reveal an intensely practical agrarian faith,
according to which human beings sought not to improve
themselves for a non-earthly afterlife, but rather to
improve the earth as they improved themselves. with the
resurrection of Christ, they believed, the earth itself,
the quality of the climate, soil, and crops would change,
assuming an Edenic state. s Donald H. Dyal, whose 1980
study outlined the tenets of Mormon agrarianism, recorded
that early Mormon leaders preached "the regeneration of
.4 Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon
Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870-1900
(Tucson, 1973), 7.
S Parley Pratt, a Church apostle, as cited in Dyal,
"The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 127.
16
the earth not only as a spiritual event, but also a
physical or more specifically agricultural event."6 Thus
Mormon farmers, like American farmers across the Midwest
and the Great Plains, saw their work as essential to the
creation of a good place, a democratic place, a place safe
from the despotism of foreigners, the depredations of
natives, and the unprincipled machinations of speculators.
Agricultural labor was indeed the key element in the
creation of a godly place in utah. Farm work provided the
Mormons with their only true means of finding a place in
God's kingdom.' This agricultural redemption of the
earth, according to Leonard J. Arrington, the pre-eminent
historian of Mormon Utah, constituted one of the seven
basic principles of Mormon theology. such redemption,
defined as lithe orderly development of local resources,"
implied that "[m]aking the waste places blossom as a rose,
and the earth to yield abundantly of its diverse fruits,
was more than an economic necessity; it was a form of
religious worship."8
In previous stages of American settlement, the
pursuit of . an ideal society peopled by yeoman farm
6 Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 128.
, Dyal, liThe Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 133.
8 Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An
Economic History of the Latter-day Saints. 1830-1900
(Cambridge, MA, 1958), 25-26.
17
families had required only hard work, perseverance, a
strong faith in God's obvious favor toward a white,
democratic civilization, and, of course, an abundance of
fertile land. In Utah, that was not enough. About 15
inches of rain fell annually on the benchlands and valley
floors of the sloping foothills of the Wasatch Front.
Even with their hard work, steel-willed leadership, and
unswerving confidence in God's favor, the Utah Saints also
needed water. The arid environment provided the backdrop
against which Utah settlers developed a strong set of
connections between the creation of ideal agricultural
communities and the bringing of irrigation water to their
farms.
The deterministic power of aridity frequently plagues
students of American western history. Did western history
unfold along certain lines because the land received less
than twenty inches of annual rainfall and thus prohibited
humid-land agriculture? Donald Worster and Wallace
stegner, two of the finest scholars of the West, see
aridity as an essential factor in the region's history.
The West is as it is, stegner declares, because "Anyone
who wants to live in the West has to manage water to some
degree." They must obey a law of water scarcity, and live
18
"within the country's rules of sparseness of mobility.,,9
In the Mormon west the water question is heightened by the
unique characteristics of utah as a sub-region. The
saints' West sprang up differently from everything that
came after. Does aridity account for the Mormons'
distinctive modes of settlement? Is water the absolute
key to understanding Mormon Utah? Worster, stegner, and
others who have addressed that question have established
beyond all doubt that the Mormon's beliefs concerning
their arid environment are as, or more, important in
understanding Utah's history, than the lack of rainfall
itself. Utah Mormons incorporated their encounters with
the arid Great Basin into their history, their belief
system, and their vision of themselves, and those images
of dryness reveal much about the role of water in the
Mormon past.
The creation of an Edenic agricultural civilization
in a barren desert was a central myth of 19th- and early
20th-century Utah Mormon culture. That myth grew out of
the parallels between the saints' migration to Utah and
the Biblical exodus, and out of the Mormon leaders' post-settlement
exaggerations of the aridity of the land along
the Wasatch Front. It turned on the belief that the east
9 Wallace stegner, The American West as LiVing Space
(Ann Arbor, 1987), 36.
19
side of the Salt Lake Valley was so dry and infertile that
it could not have supported just any group of Euro­American
settlers; only the chosen could have built an
oasis in that environment. "'I am thankful to a fulness
[sic]," declared Young in 1847, "that the Lord has brought
us to these barren valleys, to these sterile mountains, to
this desolate waste, where only the Saints can or would
live .... "w This exaggeration began as a tool for group
motivation and celebration, a way of encouraging settlers
to conquer new deserts by invoking wastelands already
banished. 11 It became, however, a fundamental building
block of collective Mormon identity: the belief that the
first settlers had brought water to an unproductive land
and made the world anew.
In reality, as geographer Richard Jackson has
proven, the first utah settlers settled an admittedly
challenging environment that was in no way barren. They
had planned it that way. Brigham Young reviewed all
available information on the Great Salt Lake region prior
to the beginning of the Mormons' 1847 overland trek. He
read trappers' and explorers' accounts of the region,
w Journal of Discourses, 4 (Liverpool, 1847), 344,
as quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 198.
11 See Richard H. Jackson, "Myth and Reality:
Environmental Perception of the Mormons, 1840-1865,
An Historical Geosophy" (Ph.D. diss., Clark
University, 1970), 84, 188.
20
which described it in turn as possessing "more than
ordinary fertility and productiveness," as "most beautiful
country ..• intersected by a number of transparent
streams. ,,12 Explorer and legendary self-promoter John C.
Fremont wrote of the northern Salt Lake Valley that "[t]he
bottoms are extensive; water excellent; timber sufficient;
the soil good, and well adapted to the grains and grasses
suited to such an elevated region •••• "u
Migrants to the Wasatch Front in the 1850s and
1860s did not settle a parched land, but rather a "narrow
oasis" in the foothills of the Wasatch mountains. w The
initial wave of settlers, Jackson established, described
their new home not as a forbidding wasteland, but as
abundant and fertile, well-suited to agricultural
pursuits. They found an environment fortuitously suited
to their understanding of how nature should support
12 On the Bear River Valley, Lanford W. Hastings,
The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California (1845;
repr. Princeton, NJ, 1932), 19; and fur trader Daniel
Potts in Donald McKay Frost, Notes on General Ashley
(Barre, MA, 1960), 63, both as quoted in Richard H.
Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 67, 74.
13 John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the
Rocky Mountains and to Oregon and Northern California
(Washington, DC, 1845), 144, as quoted in Jackson,
. "Myth and Reality," 81.
14 Dan L. Flores, "Islands in the Desert: An
Environmental Interpretation of the Rocky Mountain
Frontier" (Ph.D. diss., Texas A & M University,
1978), 238.
certain kinds of community life. surveying numerous
diaries kept by first generation settlers, Jackson found
few if any references to the environment as a "desert" a
"wasteland," or "barren."lS Instead, Jackson concluded,
21
Brigham Young and his fellow leaders fostered a set of
myths in the years following successful settlement that
caused the larger Mormon community to integrate into their
own history and consciousness a conviction that they had,
with the assistance of divine power, transformed a desert
into an oasis. 16 The Journal of Discourses, a collection
of the writings of Mormon leaders, offered convincing
examples of the instillation of the belief that the
Wasatch Front had, in 1847, been little more than, in the
words of George A. smith, "a desert, containing nothing
but a few bunches of dead grass, and crickets enough to
fence the land."n
This idea that the well-governed, hard-working
populace, and the green, thriving, well-watered fields
could not have been possible in the desert without divine
intervention held fast in Mormon culture, to be applied
again and again as settlers struck out for new colonies
lS Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 135, 134, 172.
16 See Jackson's discussion of these myths in "Myth
and Reality," 190.
n Journal of Discourses, 1 (Liverpool, 1852), 44, as
quoted in Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 190.
22
beyond the core region. Non-Mormon visitors enhanced the
mythology. After glimpsing the verdant valleys and
comparing them with other western locales, travelers came
away with a distinct sense of the Mormons as a favored
population. 18 God's particular care in fostering the
saints' survival has remained a viable tenet of Mormon
history for over a century.~
Irrigation was the single activity most key to the
transformation of the landscape from which these
environmental myths were formed. It was also the key to
the actual work done by settlers in the building of the
Mormon kingdom. The di-version of water from mountain
streams to gardens, orchards, fields, and pastures was
important to the Mormon understanding of the human place
in nature, and of nature in history. As decades passed
and the memories of those who had actually seen pre­settlement
Utah faded, the power over nature achieved by
both God and Mormon settlers continued to increase.
Pioneer history moved beyond the litany of the blossoming
desert toward a belief in the actual improvement of the
Utah climate itself. As Great Plains settlers believed
that rain followed the plow, so Mormons came to believe
that irrigation enhanced river flow. A writer in the
18 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 207.
19 Jackson, "Myth and Reality," 166.
23
Millennial star, a Mormon periodical claimed in 1884 that
"Many streams have been greatly increased in volume, and
in some places new springs have burst forth in the
desert ..•• The rainfall has greatly increased in some
localities. ,,20 water was a dynamic participant in the
mythic transformation of the desert into a garden. Each
Mormon irrigator, from 1847 on, saw himself or herself to
be participating in, and re-enacting, that transformation.
The water itself connected them to their higher religious
mission.
The Utah settlers' administration of natural
resources, most notably land, timber, and water, embodied
other theological aspects of the Mormon belief system.
Mormons held that the earth's resources belonged to God,
and were held by human beings only in a temporary state of
stewardship. Stewardship meant that the church, through
the community, allotted each individual only the amount of
land and resources that he could use for the benefit of
the community. Like the redemption of the earth,
stewardship comprised a basic tenet governing Mormon
Utah. 21
Collective stewardship as expressed in Mormon Utah
20 J. H. Ward, "Utah, Past and Present," Millennial
star 46 (1884): 520-22, as quoted in Charles S.
Peterson, Take Up Your Mission, 158.
21 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25.
24
implied a collective or cooperative mastery over nature.
Because they were stewards of their land and resources,
rather than outright individual owners, Mormon settlers
bore a specific set of obligations to the community and to
the church. Only through full and beneficial use of the
earth's bounty, they believed, could the kingdom grow.
Each individual, in maximizing the production of a single
family's allotment, could support that growth. In
addition, ten percent of a family's annual production was
given to the Church to support its activities.
Mormon communitarianism demanded that the interests
of the community come before those of the individual.
That collective legacy has come under much scholarly
scrutiny in recent decades, as historians have tested the
degree to which Mormon communities actually practiced the
communal ideals that they preached. The debate over
communalism has included considerations of the nature of
Mormon self-sufficiency, of their system of economic
distribution, and of their modes of economic production.
In a 1978 study of the political economy of Spring City, a
central utah town, Michael scott Raber contrasted local
modes of production with modes of distribution. Raber
worked from the premise that where village- and territory­wide
distribution of farm and village products were
25
communitarian, modes of production were not.n Raber
concluded that the individual family, not the community,
formed the basic unit of production and of the theological
quest for salvation through labor on the land. Donald
oyal reached a similar conclusion in his study of agrarian
values in Mormonism, noting that, in Mormon communities,
U[t]he individual or individual family is the basal unit
of all activity.un The family existed as a self-contained
production unit and a microcosm of ·God's
universal family, but according to religious and economic
ideals, the domestic unit was expected to work and produce
not primarily not only for their own benefit, but for that
of the collective as well.
In contrasting the family with the community as
important utah institutions, Michael Raber raised a number
of important points concerning the linkage between
agricultural labor, nature, and community. Raber claimed
that the Mormon settlement system, with centralized
direction of colonization and collective ownership and
development of natural resources for the common good, did
not persist beyond the most initial stages of the
colonization process. Those early years saw the
22 Michael Scott Raber, "Religious Polity and Local
Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town" (Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 1978), 11.
n Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 163.
26
conversion of common, public resources into privately held
allotments. Those allotments became the domain of
individual households, and those households were
responsible for the production of most of the goods
necessary to sustain themselves.
In Mormon communities, Raber contends, there were two
levels of production: the household level, and the supra­household,
or community level.u As a single entity, the
community cleared fields, built fences, and dug irrigation
canals. These were not tasks of actual economic
production.~ These centrally organized projects, Raber
points out, were for the most past one-time efforts to
create the infrastructure of production, which would then
support each family's independent quest to support itself.
The individual laborer contributed his time and effort to
these collective tasks only to the extent that he would
personally benefit. In fact, the individual was assigned
community labor--a length of fence or a stretch of canal-­in
direct proportion to the size and demands of his
individual holdings. In Raber's version of Mormon village
labor, an aggregate group of individuals sacrificed
fragments of their valuable time to assist in the breaking
U Raber, "Religious Policy and Local Production,"
288.
~ Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
289.
up of common resources into usable pieces. Once the
fences were built and the ditches dug, each family could
depend on protected fields and a sufficient allotment of
water. Little need remained for further communal labor.
Raber concludes that the most striking feature of the
Mormon political economy was not its cooperative nature
but "the relative lack of corporate arrangements for
production at levels of operation above or beyond the
household, and the self-conscious containment within the
household of as much labor as needed on individual farm
tasks .... ,,26
Raber's analysis of these underlying economic
patterns rightly emphasizes the importance of family in
27
the Mormon community. Like John Borrowman and his journal
record of his first son's birth, the individual utah
settler understood and expressed his or her attachments to
God, land, and community through the lens of family.
Raber does not consider, however, the ways in which the
individual family remained connected to the community,
especially to its ideals, its work, and its resources,
after the initial community projects were completed. One
of the ways they remained connected was through their
continued use of irrigation water. water in Mormon
26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
288.
28
communities flowed out of canyons, which were public
spaces, through main-line canals, which were owned and
managed by community groups, and, finally, into fields and
yards, which were worked by families for family survival.
water connected those different realms, and thus connected
families to the community. It also caused conflicts
between families and the community. The larger purpose of
the irrigation system, as Raber pointed out, was indeed to
bring water to family spaces, to private spaces.v But it
passed out of nature and through the community to get to
those spaces, and thus both nature and community played a
role in family water use. In addition, Mormon family
activities of building and beautifying a home and garden,
and raising children to further the religious community,
were inherently connected to larger communal goals.
Raber's conclusion that the collective construction
of economic infrastructure of production was a one-time
happening after which the individual family took over the
bulk of economic activity is tempered by his admission
that water was a resource different in quality and use
from land, animals, timber, homes, and churches. The
creation of an irrigation system did not immediately
produce anything, but instead created a means for
v Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
190.
29
producing from fields, gardens, and orchards. "The
difference was," Raber admitted, "that irrigation involved
continuing renewal of this act of creation, while the less
fluid elements of crop production did not. ,,28 Community
irrigation construction efforts could last for years, and
the repairs could last forever. In this "continual
renewal" of the "act of creation," the annual planning and
carrying out of the repair and use of the irrigation
canals and ditches, lay the crux of these linkages between
individual Mormon families and the Mormon spiritual
universe. Cooperative economic activity sometimes did
decline sharply after the early years of settlement, but
each individual family remained tied to the legacy of that
cooperativism by continuing ties to irrigation systems, to
which they still contributed labor or taxes, and from
which they drew water. Those ties to their community were
not always welcome, or peaceful, or productive, but they
remained. And every spring, with the start of the
irrigation season, Mormons re-affirmed the connections
between their labor, their community, their mastery of
nature in the proving of God's bounty, and their
redemption of the earth.
Water and work gave substance to these connections.
28 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
289.
30
Mastery of nature and the purifying of the land served as
powerful motivating ideals, but most Mormon families
devoted their lives to muddy physical labor. The history
of that labor is distinctive not because of the doctrine
of stewardship or the injunction to master nature, but
because of the clarity and faith with which the people
themselves understood stewardship, mastery, neighborly
relations, and the day-to-day meaning of their work.
Henry Ballard, a Cache Valley settler, reported a
gathering of neighbors in the "well crowded" Logan
schoolhouse on the undoubtedly chilly evening of February
4, 1860. "It was a time of rejoicing," Ballard wrote.
"Brother Hammon[d] Advised us not to forget our Dutys when
the Spring opened but to be Alive to our Duty at all times
in the Kanyon and in our fields and in all our
movements.,,29 Forty-five years later an editorial in the
agricultural periodical Deseret Farmer claimed that "One
of the greatest joys of the farmer's life should come from
a realization of the relation of his work to that of his
Creator. He is co-operating with nature--which is the
handiwork of God--and from lifeless, . useless things he
creates articles for which a hungry, dependent world is
29 Henry Ballard Journal, 4 February 1860, TS, Joel E.
Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vols. 1-2, Utah
State University Library, Logan, UT.
31
longing. ,,30
That Henry Ballard and his fellow saints strove to be
alive to their duty while cutting timber or digging
ditches, or that they thought about their duty to their
community and their God, gave them a connection to the
land and water with which they worked. They understood
themselves to be cooperating with nature, even when they
had no conception of the autonomous ecological processes
which they interrupted. Their labor had layers of
symbolic meaning; like water, it tied them to nature, to
each other, and to God.
Physical labor, of course, had much to do with the
bringing of water to the newly carved out croplands along
the Wasatch benches. The act of working together to build
and maintain ditches reinforced the connections between
nature, community, and the religious mission. Long after
utah was integrated into mainstream America and its
culture of rampant individuality, irrigation systems
continued to require the aggregate labor of individual
water users, and continued to reinforce those linkages.
The paradoxes of being an individual both separate from
the community, and connected by labor and water to the
physical community and the spiritual universe, permeated
30 "The Other Side of Farming," Deseret Farmer 1 (15
June 1905).
Mormon life. Those paradoxes found one avenue of
expression in the myriad uses of water.
32
33
CHAPTER III
FROM LOGAN RIVER TO LOGAN TOWN
Prior to 1859, water flowed out of the high limestone
confines of Logan canyon and into Cache Valley without
crossing any major thresholds other than the gradual slope
of the valley floor . . with rapid Mormon settlement in the
early 1860s, the Logan River became part of a new ecology,
a new system of encounters and exchanges in which the
river itself played a crucial part. with its shaping of,
and integration into, the villages of the east side of the
valley, the river was channelled in new directions, for
new purposes, across new thresholds.
As the villages of Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield
sprang up, and as their citizens dug canals between them,
the water flowed out of the canyon, a "natural" realm,
into the towns, which were spiritual communities with a
specific millennialist purpose, and a distinctive physical
structure which reflected that spiritual goal. Within
those communities, water diverted from the Logan River
flowed between the larger social world of the village into
the smaller domains of individual families. In doing so
it flowed from the patriarchal world where male heads of
household worked with, controlled, and directed water, to
34
the familial world of the house and garden. In the main
"trunk" canals which crossed the benches, pastures, and
grain fields, water flowed between the separate villages,
connecting them in ways no other shared resource could.
The Logan River possessed natural characteristics
that attracted Mormon settlers and structured the ways in
which they used water. In comparison with other
drainages, it was easily exploited. Any understanding of
community water use must first take the river itself, and
the landscape, into account. From its headwaters
northeast of the town of Logan, the Logan River runs
twenty-odd miles through the Bear River mountains, a spur
of the Wasatch mountains, and down Logan Canyon to the
floor of Cache Valley, where it joins the Bear River. The
river drains 223 square miles of watershed, a topography
that ranges from elevations of just over 4,000 feet above
sea level to nearly 10,000 feet.l The Bear River
mountains are predominantly limestone, with sandstone and
dolomite in places. None of those rock formations readily
absorb water. 2 Large glacial deposits at the center of
the watershed do absorb water, and their storage capacity
1 Frank W. Haws, "A critical Analysis of Water Rights
and Institutional Factors and their Effect on the
Development of Logan River" (Master's thesis, utah
state University, 1965), 4.
2 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 9.
35
supplies the river's continuous flow. 3 The geology of the
region thus insures that most of the precipitation that
falls on the watershed ends up in the river.
The key climatological aspect of the valley's
dependence on the Logan River watershed is the sharp
discrepancy in precipitation between the valley floor and
the nearby mountains. Annual precipitation in Cache
Valley averages just over sixteen inches. The high peaks
of the Bear River range just east of the valley, average
over fifty inches in a year, most of it in the winter, in
the form of snow. Because the Logan watershed is, in the
words of water economist Frank Haws, a "tightly closed
hydrologic system," it allows minimum loss or gain of
water to or from invisible sources. The river thus
efficiently conveys a sUbstantial volume of water out of
the ' inaccessible mountains and canyon and onto the valley
floor. There the annual surface runoff is quite easily
harnessed by hand-dug irrigation systems. 4 The keys to
that water management are the seasonal patterns of
precipitation and river flow, which must be manipulated to
provide water according to human, rather than natural,
patterns.
After emerging from the mountains at the mouth of
3 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11.
4 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 11.
36
Logan Canyon, the river cuts through the benches on the
eastern slopes of the valley, and across the flat valley
floor, meeting the Bear River in the middle of lowlying
wetlands at the valley's center. Like the Great Salt Lake
Valley, Cache Valley is a legacy of Lake Bonneville, the
great inland sea of which Salt Lake is a surviving
remnant. About 18,000 years ago, the ancient lake reached
its highest level at an elevation of just over 5,000 feet.
Streams entering the lake formed deltas of sand and gravel
which became high benches at the mouths of canyons; as the
lake's level dropped, new deltas formed out of "sandy,
porous chestnut soils, fertile and rich in lime."s This
successive formation of deltas and fans at different
levels left a series of flat, raised steps that climbed
down the valley's walls. As it receded further, the lake
left layers of alluvial deposits which now form the valley
floor. 6
The nineteenth-century Mormon immigrants settled in
the transition zone of the Wasatch mountain range, an area
environmental historian Dan Flores characterizes as a
"narrow, rich, alluvial piedmont of fans, deltas, and
S Dan L. Flores, "Zion in Eden: Phases of the
Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review
7 (Winter 1983): 328.
6 A. J. Simmonds, "Lake Bonneville Sculpted Cache
Valley Landscape," [Logan, UT] Herald Journal, 26
March 1989, Bridgerland section, 90-91.
37
terraces, through which meandered the sweet clear water of
the mountains."7 Receiving between 13 and 18 inches of
rain and snow in a year, this corridor of fertile soils
was, in Cache Valley even more than along the Great Salt
Lake, particularly suited to Mormon social, religious, and
economic goals of agrarian communitarianism, self­sufficiency,
and isolation. As settlers gravitated toward
the confluence of water, timber, fertile soil, and grazing
bottoms at the mouths of the canyons, they remade the
transition zone into a Mormon settlement zone. The
villages that the Utah pilgrims located on and near the
Logan river, like others along the Wasatch Front,
evidenced a perceptive environmental strategy, a
consciousness of the value of the resources available in
those particular places. That consciousness was reflected
in the organization and form of the villages themselves,
as well as in their location against the dramatic backdrop
of the Wasatch foothills.
The structure of Mormon communities, like the
structure of the Logan River watershed, or of the soils of
Cache Valley's alluvial benches, is crucial to an
understanding of the flow of water between the two. The
Mormon village, according to Leonard J. Arrington, held a
venerable place, with the redemption of the earth and the
7 Flores, "Zion in Eden," 327.
38
stewardship of property, as an underlying economic ideal
of the Saints' mission, one of the key foundation stones
in the edifice of the Kingdom. 8 The village pattern was
based on the Plat of the city of Zion, a plan first put
forth by church founder Joseph smith in the early 1830s
when he planned settlements for Jackson County, Missouri.
smith's plan called for a mile square village with blocks
of ten acres divided into twenty lots, each a half acre in
size. streets ran east/west or north/south. House lots
included room for a garden and lawn, or orchard. Farmland
was located outside the residential areas of the town. 9
This Missouri-born plan continued to guide village
planning once the Mormons left the Midwest for Utah.
Though conceived long before the saints' plans to move to
the arid west, the four-square, compact village surrounded
by crop fields proved, as Leonard Arrington pointed out,
"peculiarly adapted" to Mormon goals for life in the Great
Basin. 10 The tightly concentrated housing pattern kept
settlers close together, providing for a wealth of social
and religious activities, easy regulation of community
projects, and collective defense against displaced groups
of Shoshone-Bannocks. In addition, Arrington noted, the
8 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24-25.
9 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 10.
10 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 24.
village as it developed on the Wasatch Front and
throughout Utah, "permitted effective irrigation
culture."n
39
The compact settlement pattern that characterized
Mormon villages, though evolved from ideal images of early
New England towns, contributed significantly to the
success of Utah irrigation. with homes and gardens
concentrated in a small area, a few main canals branching
from the local river were split into networks of smaller
ditches. These in turn brought water to each family, with
the water itself traveling as little distance as possible.
The same main canals could carry water to agricultural
fields both before and after they passed through the
residential areas of the village. Those same canals could
continue beyond the boundaries of the village and its
fields to serve the next village to the north or south
along the base of the foothills. The Mormon village
pattern thus encouraged efficiency of ditch-digging and of
water use, though efficiency was not always the result.
The importance of water and its flow within the village
grid itself will be taken up in the next chapter. Water
outside that grid, in canals and between villages, held
different meanings.
Samuel Fortier, a hydrographer and engineer who
n Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 25.
40
surveyed Cache Valley's water resources in the late 1890s,
drew a detailed map of the region, showing the irrigation
canals and ditches and the land they watered [Figures 2,
2AJ. Fortier's map demonstrates the marked contrast
between the path of Logan River canals between the
separate village grids of Logan, Hyde Park, and
smithfield, and their trajectories within the villages
themselves. Outside the rigid geometry of the towns, the
canals looked somewhat like tributaries to the rivers,
curving with the topography of the valley's sloping floor.
within the gridS, especially in Logan, the canals followed
the straight lines and right angles the village streets,
conforming to the order that the Mormons brought to their
wilderness. The flow of water outside towns and between
towns looked different, looked more river-like, more
"natural." The canals' curving paths appeared somewhat
analogous to that of the river itself. Folklorist Austin
Fife noticed the contrasts between natural patterns of
river flow and strict angles of the village grid. He
wrote in 1979 that "the rectangular grids followed by the
fenced property lines and roads did not synchronize with
the terrain features that had to be followed in order to
always keep the naturally flowing water where it could
I
Figure 2. Cache Valley Basin with Inset [see Figure 2A]
Showing Logan River Canals, Including Logan and Richmond,
and Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canals. From Samuel
Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley (Logan, 1897).
i!
~ .....
42
N
43
reach the cultivatable land."n Beyond village
boundaries, irrigation canals were more like rivers. They
were, in fact, new, human-made rivers, directed toward
community ends, but eternally plagued by non-human nemeses
such as mountain topography, muskrats, mudslides, moss,
and floods.
In a recent history of Chicago, western and
environmental historian William Cronon uses the Hegelian
and Marxist ideas of "first nature" and "second nature" to
explore how 19th-century Chicagoans defined, and
redefined, the "natural. "13 In Chicago, "first nature,"
the original, naturally created landscape, embodied a
range of different possibilities open to Euro-American
settlers and developers. out of "their vision of what it
should be" early Chicagoans built on top of that first
landscape, "[a] kind of 'second nature,' designed by
people and 'improved' toward human ends. "14 In doing so,
they imposed "their own order ••• on the world of first
12 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned, Horse Powered,
Irrigated, Multiple Produce Farms of the
Intermountain West," TS, 1979, Utah state University
Library, Logan, UT, 13.
13 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: chicago and
the Great West (New York, 1991), xvii. Nature's
Metropolis explores the city's meteoric development
through the transformation of its western hinterland,
and in the commoditization of the goods--grain, wood,
and meat--produced in that transformation.
W Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 55-56.
44
nature ••.• ,,15 That human order remained "natural,"
though, because it conformed to human visions of what
should happen in that particular place, the trajectory of
the appropriate course of events. Furthermore, "second
nature" so thoroughly obscured "first nature" that it took
its place. That which was man-made was taken to be a gift
of nature, so easily, so "naturally," had it arisen in
nature's place.
According to this idea of second nature, the
railroads which passed through Chicago seemed natural.
The flat landscape around the city and in it,s hinterland
was "peculiarly suited" to railroads, much as the fringes
of the Wasatch Front seemed so "naturally" adapted to
compact Mormon villages and their irrigation systems. 16
That either of them--Chicago railroads or utah irrigation
canals--sprang up and thrived, seemed entirely natural, as
did their transformation of the surrounding landscape. In
addition, Cronon points out, the bison and pine trees,
which had once been part only of "first nature," became
something entirely different when drawn into the human­constructed
world of "second nature. ,,17 They became
commodities of the market, "things priced, bought, and
15 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 146.
16 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 72.
n Cronan, Nature's Metropolis, 266.
sold within a system of human exchange. ,,18 water in utah
followed much the same path.
45
Cronon also proposes that the distance between first
nature and second nature, is, in the history of Chicago
and its hinterland, a measure of the movement from "local
ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy. ,,19
In other words, the extent to which human construction of
second nature obliterates first nature signals the degree
of a place's integration into a larger economic system.
It is that larger system, one of global markets, that
redefines the "local" as something that is no longer
local, that reshapes the first nature that made a city or
a hinterland what it was to begin with, into something
entirely different.
Cronon's discussions of first and second nature,
though focused on a topic far from Mormon irrigation canal
systems, make a number of important points about any human
manipulation of a natural landscape. First of all, the
canals that Cache Valley Mormons built to carry water from
the Logan River to their houses, yards, and fields
constituted a form of second nature. They caused water to
flow to places it had not flowed before, changing not only
the n·ewly-watered land, but the river itself. To the
18 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 266.
19 Cronon, Nature's Metropolis, 267.
46
settlers who oversaw that process, the canals became,
literally, second nature, an obvious, "natural" solution
to their need to redistribute the river to meet human
needs. The canals became elements of a landscape destined
for a full-fledged flowering of the Mormon kingdom and for
the fulfillment of the land's bounteous agricultural and
"natural" potential.
The water that flowed out of the Logan River and into
irrigation canals was thus redefined, culturally, and
economically. It was made part of a unique system of
human exchange, given all of the spiritual, cultural, and
historical meanings that Mormons bestowed upon water. The
water of the Logan, as it flowed through Cache Valley
villages, became part of a second nature. It was
irrevocably separated from the water that continued on,
uncaptured, across the valley to the Bear River, and into
the Great Salt Lake. As irrigation water, it was
measured, timed, commoditized, distributed, stored, and
fought over in ways that changed its meaning and identity.
While irrigation canals formed a vital and distinct
second nature, imposed by human artifice, they did not
subsume the Logan River itself. The Logan continued to
flow, even if diminished, much as it .always had. First
and second nature co-existed to a certain degree, both
remaining visible, both struggling with the other to
47
assert its own order and dominance. According to Cronon's
formulation, this "failure" of second nature to obliterate
first nature was an indication of the enduring localism of
this particular cultural and economic use of nature. In
Cache Valley, second nature was built on top of first
nature without causing first nature to be completely lost.
Both "natures" were natural, but neither gained the upper
hand, neither came to completely dominate the other.
Mormon settlers lived and irrigated in Salt Lake
Valley for a dozen years before Church President Brigham
Young dispatched colonizers north to Cache Valley.
Young's scouts had termed Cache "the most beautiful valley
that they had seen," on an initial survey in August
1847 .20 Grazers took church cattle herds north to graze
in Cache Valley in 1855, but harsh conditions--colder
winters than the Salt Lake area--discouraged settlement
until 1856, when Peter and Mary Ann Maughan and their
family founded Wellsville. Skirmishes with Shoshone
cattle rustlers and the threat from the federal army in
the Utah War further delayed a proper foothold of villages
W Thomas Bullock Pioneer Camp Journal No.2, 1847,
quoted in Joel E. Ricks, Forms and Methods of Early
Mormon Settlement in Utah and the Surrounding Region.
1847 to 1877 (Logan, UT, 1964), 43.
until 1859. 21 Over 2,000 settlers, many of them northern
European immigrants, flooded in over the next two years,
establishing a string of towns at the base of the
48
mountains including Paradise, Millville, Logan, Hyde Park,
Mendon, and Smithfield. This impressive rate of
colonization continued through the early 1860s, with Logan
reaching a population of 1,727 by 1870, and Smithfield of
676 by 1867.n That growth continued. Over 5,700 people
lived in Logan by 1895, and over 1,400 in Smithfield. In
only 35 years, 18,286 people settled in Cache Valley,
rapidly transforming its landscape and the flow of water
across that landscape. n
When the newly arrived citizens of Logan first
diverted the waters of the Logan River in mid-May of 1860,
they baptized themselves and the river into a new set of
hierarchies--beliefs, laws, and practices--concerning
water use. The basic tenets of religious belief that
21 Ricks, FOrms and Methods of Early Mormon
Settlement, 64-65; and Feramorz Young Fox, "The
Mormon Land System: A Study of the Settlement and
Utilization of Land Under the Direction of the Mormon
Church" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1932),
65.
n Logan population figure from Haws, "Development of
.Logan River," 42; Smithfield population figure from
The History of Smithfield (Smithfield, UT, 1927), 8.
n Samuel Fortier, The water Supply of Cache Valley,
Utah Agricultural Experiment station Bulletin no. 50
(Logan, UT, 1897), 16.
49
influenced water use have been outlined, but the structure
of actual irrigation practice that grew from those beliefs
and from the settlers' goals for their community are of
equal importance in unravelling the place of water in that
community.
The history of Utah irrigation institutions has been
told numerous times since the late 19th century by skilled
historians and engineers armed with massive documentary
evidence of, and direct experience with, state-wide
patterns of water administration.~ A firm consensus on
the basic characteristics of the Mormon system runs
through those histories. This consensus holds that
Brigham Young formulated a water policy by combining the
principle of divinely granted stewardship of the earth's
resources with knowledge gained form Hispanic water
systems. Drawing from those sources, he decreed that
water was a public resource, owned in common by all
~ This work includes: Charles Hillman Brough,
Irrigation in Utah (Baltimore, 1895); William E.
Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York,
1900>'; George Thomas, The Development of Institutions
Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early
Utah Conditions (New York, 1920); Elwood Mead, Report
of Irrigations Investigations in Utah, U. S.
Department of Agriculture Office of Experiment
Stations Bulletin No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1903);
and John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of
the Evolution of Institutions Dealing with Water
Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through 1947"
(Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989).
50
members of the community.~ Water rights were grounded in
the dual doctrines of beneficial" use and prior
appropriation. The first to divert water from its natural
course and put it to work in a manner useful to the
community established rights to the amount diverted. Only
a lapse of beneficial use abrogated those rights.
Another key element of water use concerns the Mormon
Church hierarchy, which controlled water rights until well
into the twentieth century, and in informal ways does so
today. As a result, "beneficial use" meant "beneficial"
in the eyes of the church, beneficial to the progress of
the community as they defined both "progress" and
"community. ,,26 This meant that any use of water not
sanctioned by the church could be relegated to secondary
status. A. J. Simmonds, in his history of non-Mormon
settlers in Cache Valley, described how this led, at least
initially, to a segregation of agricultural pursuits.
Mormons, with their community-constructed water canals,
raised grain crops on irrigated farmland. Gentiles,
~ On the influence of Hispanic water law, Dan L.
Flores, in "Zion in Eden," 330, noted that church
leaders borrowed the idea of public ownership of
water combined with priority rights to diversion from
Hispanic communities of the Southwest. Richard
Jackson notes that the Mormon battalion sent to fight
the Mexican War studied irrigation systems in "Myth
and Reality," 120.
26 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
168.
51
locked out of those canal systems by religious separatism,
settled less irrigable parts of the valley, and supported
themselves by raising livestock.v
These principles of public supervision, beneficial
use, and ecclesiastical control distinguished Mormon water
systems from those of other western regions. other
qualities contributed to their distinctness as well:
their cooperative nature; their diminutive scale in
comparison to other projects across the West; the simple
tools used in their construction; and the speed,
simplicity, and frugality of that construction. In 1865,
even with ever-mounting numbers of Utah settlers demanding
new and larger canals, the 277 existing canals in the
territory averaged a mere 3.7 miles in length. 28 The over
800 cooperatively owned ditches carrying water in Utah in
1920 had an average capacity of 24.5 second-feet, compared
to the over 70 second-feet of water that ran in ditches in
California, Idaho, and Colorado.~ Whatever magic made
v See A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache
Valley: A Study of the Logan Apostasies of 1874 and
the Establishment of Non-Mormon Churches in Cache
Valley. 1873-1913 (Logan, UT, 1976).
28 Leonard J. Arrington and Dean May, "'A Different
Mode of Life': Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth­Century
Utah," in Agriculture in the Development of
the Far West, ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D.
C., 1975),8.
29 Fox, "The Mormon Land System," 5.
the Mormon irrigation system successful, that magic had
nothing to do with scale. The Mormon genius for
distributing water lay in their consistent ability to
manage small volumes of water.
52
The pioneers' rapid construction of the first canals
has become legendary in utah, and is chronicled in
innumerable community histories. Leonard Arrington
recorded the Cache Valley tale of how 28 men and boys from
the town of Hyrum, south of Logan, spent most of the month
of May, 1860 digging a nine mile long, four-foot deep
irrigation ditch, by hand, while the town shored them up
with daily deliveries of food and milk.~ Just to the
north, Logan settlers labored from late March to mid-May
of 1860 scraping out enough of the Logan and Hyde Park
canal to water 2000 acres that first summer. 31 Each
farmer contributed labor in proportion to his land
holdings, which were limited by family size, and doled out
in twenty acre parcels by church leaders. Most of the
ditch work was done with picks, shovels, and wooden plows
pulled by ox-teams. Milk-pails and home-made plumb lines
~ Leonard J. Arrington, "Life and Labor Among the
Pioneers," in The History of a Valley: Cache Valley,
Utah-Idaho, ed. Joel E. Ricks (Logan, UT, 1956), 149-
50.
31 Joel E. Ricks, The Beginnings of Settlement In
Cache Valley, Twelfth Annual Faculty Research
Lecture, Utah State Agricultural College (Logan, UT,
1953), 23.
53
served as surveying tools. There is no denying the co­operative
nature of this work, the almost total lack of
capital investment, or the speed with which water reached
the croplands. The centrality of the first act of
communal ditch-digging to pioneer narratives underscored
the parallel between the birth of the community and the
first watering of the land. 32
While this general picture of pioneer irrigation
provides an accurate account of the cooperation demanded
of Utah settlers in the face of isolation and starvation,
it lacks depth. Most Utah historians, and water
historians, invoke this basic outline without providing
much detail to color in the picture. This lack of
specificity is rooted in a point that Leonard Arrington
and Dean May made in their 1975 discussion of irrigation
as '" A Different Mode of Life.' ,,33 "The most striking
aspect of the institutions devised for the control of
32 For other pioneer accounts, see Marlyn L. Fife,
"Irrigation water Values in Cache County, Utah"
(Master's thesis, Utah state University, 1967), 15i
Ricks, ed., History of a Valley, 149, and Ricks, The
Beginnings of Settlement In Cache Valley, 32; Isaac
Sorensen, "History of Mendon, 1857-1919," TS, Joel E.
Ricks Collection of Transcriptions, vol. 1, Utah
state University Library, 3; History of Smithfield,
47; and Richmond Bicentennial Committee, The History
· of Richmond. UT (Richmond, UT, 1976), 17.
33 Arrington and May, '" A Different Mode of Life':
Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah,"
in Agriculture in the Development of the Far West,
ed. James H. Shideler (Washington, D. C., 1975).
54
water," May and Arrington wrote, "would seem to be that
they were, for the most part, informal and unarticulated-­barely
institutions in the strictest sense.,,34 Given the
milieu of religious beliefs that surrounded these water
"institutions," it is not hard to understand that they
were "unarticulated," and that historians find it
difficult to pin them down, or to move beyond an
invocation of their standard characteristics into a closer
look at the place of water at various levels of community
life.
The celebrated process by which irrigation canals
came into being, this cooperative labor in the interest of
group survival, held within itself the tension that
remained central to the later administration of the
systems. An individual farmer's contribution of his own
labor to the digging and maintenance of a canal, whether
through labor or taxes, was the key means by which he
secured a private right to have water turned onto his
land. This labor established personal water rights,
becoming, as historian John Harvey writes, lithe most
crucial element in transforming a portion of the public
34 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life, '"
19.
55
domain into usable (semi-private) property. ,,35 An
individual family, once in possession of land and a water
right, and dependent on that land and water for survival,
was forced to straddle an ill-defined line between their
own best interests and that of the community which,
through the ditch, had made their individual freehold
possible, and which sustained them in numerous other
material and spiritual ways. This system of securing
one's place in the community, on the land, and along the
ditch, made perfect sense to those attuned to Brigham
Young's exhortations on manual labor as crucial to the
progress of the community and the Kingdom.~ Just as
individual Mormons devoted themselves to physical labor to
gain membership in the post-resurrection world, so they
labored on irrigation canals to gain their place in the
agricultural approximation of that world in utah.
Salvation and farming were individual pursuits, however,
and therein lay the true challenge of community
irrigation.
The three major canals that ran water from the Logan
river north through Logan toward Hyde Park and smithfield
35 John Swenson Harvey, "An Historical Overview of the
EVolution of Institutions Dealing with water Resource
Use and Water Resource Development in Utah, 1847 through
1947" (Master's thesis, Utah State University, 1989),
19.
36 Dyal, "The Agrarian Values of Mormonism," 154.
56
were the Logan and Hyde Park, begun in 1860, the Logan and
Richmond (later Logan Northern), begun in 1864, and the
Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, begun in 1881. As was
common in foothill settlements, irrigators dug the lowest
canal first, the one furthest from the mouth of the canyon
and closest to the center of the incipient town. There,
the gentler slope and easier-managed river banks made the
cutting of headgates fairly simple. Diversion from the
river on a relatively flat plain was the first settlers'
only viable option, as they lacked the time and equipment
to begin ditch construction up in the rocky canyon itself.
within Cache Valley's simple gravity flow irrigation
systems, main canals branched into smaller ditches, and
then into crop rows and village gardens. Water could be
diverted only onto land that lay downhill from the canal,
and thus irrigators referred to their land as being
"under" the canal. The first Logan canal, the Logan and
Richmond, watered land below it, leaving large tracts of
irrigable land above the canal waterless until irrigators
dug the higher, or "high-line" canals. Irrigators started
the later ditches as soon as the rapidly growing
population laid claim to enough land and demanded water.
Since the three main Logan River canals ran down, or west,
from the their diversion points and then swung north
toward Hyde Park and Smithfield, each brought the new
swath of land below it, but above the lower canal, into
cultivation. As folklorist Austin Fife pointed out, the
lines of the canals marked patterns of land use. Land
above the canal, without water, was used for grazing or
dry-farming, and had a distinct, unwatered appearance.
"Below" the canal, the greener orchards, gardens, and
fields evidenced an entirely different regime. TI In
57
bringing land under a canal, Mormon villagers transformed
it from desert to garden. They brought it into their
kingdom, a realm of order and civilization. Each canal,
in bringing another level of the valley's fertile borders
into that realm, constituted an enormous gain, both
materially and spiritually. Samuel Roskelley of
Smithfield reported such a gain in his journal for 1885,
the year in which the Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield
Canal was completed as far as Smithfield. "On Tuesday 16
June," he declared in larger-than-usual handwriting,
indicating his excitement, "the water first reached my
land east of my farm through the Upper Logan Canal [ ,']
which is a source of great rejoicing to me, to know that
the water will run through from Logan. ,,38
37 Austin E. Fife, "Family Owned Farms," 13.
38 Samuel Roskelley Diary, 20 June 1885, MS, Utah
State University Library, Logan, UT.
58
with this pattern of parallel ditches built at
increasing elevations came a hierarchy of water diversion.
The higher canals, built later than the original, lower-elevation
canals, took water from the Logan River at
points further upstream from the headgates of the earlier
canals. The high-line ditches had the power to take water
first, to affect the water supply of all downstream
diverters. In the late 1890s the Logan, Hyde Park and
Smithfield Canals, the Logan and Richmond Canal, and the
Logan, Hyde Park, and Thatcher Canal ranked first, second,
and fourth in order of elevation, but in opposite order
for priority of diversion. 39 This ascendancy of elevation
over community-sanctioned priorities of water right
required water users under the higher canals to heed the
social restrictions on their favored geographical
position. The members of each canal company had social
and economic relationships with those of the other
companies, much like the relationships among farmers with
land along the same ditch.~ Ideally, those relationships
worked to nullify the natural advantages held by higher­elevation
diverters who could take water before it reached
. 39 Samuel Fortier lists all Logan diverters in order
of elevation in The water Supply of Cache Valley, 19.
~ Arthur Maass and Raymond L. Anderson, ... and the
Desert Shall Rejoice; Conflict. Growth. and Justice
in Arid Environments (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 2.
the headgates of lower canals. The tension between the
social imperatives of the Mormon irrigation system and
those geographic advantages played an important role in
community water use.
The two lower Logan River canals, Logan and Hyde
Park, and Logan and Richmond, came into being under the
59
auspices of the local county court, the first formal legal
institution charged with the allocation of water
resources, and the first administrative structure to give
some shape to the "informal and unarticulated" world of
water use. 41 Peter Maughan, founder of Wellsville--Cache
Valley's first town--and a bishop, or ward leader
appointed by the Church, took his position as probate
judge of Cache County at its creation in 1856, well before
permanent settlement. In doing so he became both civil
and religious leader of the community.~ As county judge,
Maughan had direct control over the allocation of natural
resources. He was directed in that function by an 1852
territorial law which read:
The country courts shall ••• have control of all
timber, water privileges, or any watercourse or
creek, to grant mill sites, and exercise such powers
as in their judgment shall best preserve the timber
41 Arrington and May, "'A Different Mode of Life,'"
19.
42 Craig Woods Fuller, "Development of Irrigation in
Wasatch County" (Master's thesis, Utah state
University, 1973), 28.
60
and subserve the interests of the settlements in the
distribution of water for irrigation or other
purposes. 43
This law embodied Mormon ideals of stewardship and
community development, and contained according to early
analyst Elwood Mead, "some of the best features of the
highest development of irrigation law."44
In lauding Mormon policy, Mead may have had in mind
the inherent localism of administration, as well as the
underlying principle of public ownership of water and
timber. Despite the centralized power inherent in church-directed
Mormon colonization, the probate judge's powers
over water resources represented anything but dictatorship
to Cache Valley settlers. It was more a system of
accepted custom, by which the water flowing through the
community canal could not be taken, or rights to it
challenged by anyone outside the community. Town leaders,
holding the powers granted by both church and court,
decided what was good for the collective. They assured
everyone who worked within the local system the benefits
of that system. Because community benefit involved the
pursuit of an equal distribution of natural resources, the
~ Quoted in Elwood Mead, Irrigation Institutions: A
Discussion of the Economic and Legal Questions
Created by the Growth of Irrigated Agriculture in the
West (New York, 1903), 221.
44 Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 221.
county court had to weigh petitions for water and timber
according to that ideal. It rarely adjudicated direct
conflicts over a particular amount of water or stand of
timber, however. Those fights were settled outside the
legal structure by the parties involved, by watermasters
of irrigation companies, or by local bishops, who,
admittedly, often served as probate judges and town
councilmen. The imperatives of community and of shared
61
wealth dictated that Mormons turn to church institutions,
and to their well-enforced sense of mission and community,
to settle disputes.~
From 1852 until 1880, the county court heard
petitions for rights to irrigation water and mill sites,
and timber and grazing lands. Hyde Park founder William
Hyde applied to the court in December 1862 for "a grant of
one fourth of the water running in the north fork of Logan
River enlarging the present water ditch by which the farms
at Hyde Park are irrigated."~ In June of 1863 the court
granted a mill right to Thomas Smart and Samuel Parkinson
for use of the waters of the Cub River west of Franklin.~
45 Raber, "Religious Polity and Local Production,"
174.
~ Cache County Court, "'A'County Book of the County
of Cache, Organized April 4, 1857," 'TS, Utah state
University Library, 18.
~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 37.
62
The entire town of Smithfield acquired rights in March
1874 to "the big bend on Bear River" for grazing
purposes. 48 Probate judges also granted individuals or
groupS franchises on certain community projects, including
timber harvesting, the running of saw and grist mills, and
road construction. The county court defined borders of
new towns, and appointed town watermasters and road
supervisors, and other guardians of the infrastructure.
until the Irrigation District Law of 1865 took effect in
Cache Valley, the county court also controlled the
appointment of boards of directors, and the organization
of community irrigation districts and companies, among
them the Logan and Richmond Canal Company, founded in
1864.
The Logan and Richmond Canal got its start in the
usual Mormon way. In 1864, new lands were surveyed above
the towns on the east side of the valley, and Ezra Taft
Benson, church leader for all of Cache Valley, called a
meeting to point out "the benefits that naturally would
arise" from a second, higher Logan River canal. 49 Soon
thereafter, another important segment of the valley's
~ Cache County, "'A' County Book," 221.
49 Lydia T. Nyman and Venetta K. Gilgen,
"Miscellaneous Papers on the History of North Logan,
UT," TS, 1959-60, utah state University Library,
Logan, UT, 3.
63
"second nature" came into being. Benson appointed five
men--one each from Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield, Richmond,
and Franklin, Idaho--to oversee the project and coordinate
laborers. A professional surveyor ran a line for the
canal from the mouth of the canyon, along the steep slope
of the Logan bench, or "sidehill," and then north out of
Logan toward Hyde Park. 5o Given the rocky conditions at
the canyon mouth, and the gradient of the sidehill, this
second canal posed greater challenges than had the Logan
and Hyde Park in 1860.
In an extension of the each-farmer-digs-in­proportion-
to-his-Iand-holdings labor formula, each town
was assigned a section of the difficult sidehill in
proportion to the acreage that it, as a town, expected to
water from the new canal. 51 Digging began that fall and
continued off and on through the winter. Newly-arrived
immigrants taking up the newly-surveyed lands joined the
previous settlers in digging the canal, and thus earned
their right to irrigate from its flow. By the end of 1865
they had 2000 acres under the new canal. 52
As always, farmers and gardeners under the new canal
established rights to the "new" water by putting that
50 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3.
51 Nyman and Gilgen, "History of North Logan, UT," 3.
52 Haws, "Development of Logan River," 45.
64
water to community-defined beneficial uses. Those uses
were, as usual, defined by the small group of men holding
positions of church and community leadership. The impetus
to begin the second canal had come from a powerful,
prominent church leader whose vision for the community was
perceived as having divine sanction. The group charged
with the canal's direction included Samuel Roskelley and
Marriner Merrill, both town bishops--prominent church and
community leaders.
Though this small group of men controlled the
construction and administration of the Logan and Richmond,
they turned to the county court for official recognition
of their activities. The legal structure governing their
efforts shifted slightly however, with passage of the
Irrigation District Law in 1865. The 1865 law empowered
the residents of any geographical area, a valley, village,
or neighborhood, to, with the approval of the county
court, organize and tax themselves for the construction
and management of canals. 53 Under this measure, the court
assured that only those citizens who wanted water, and
wanted to contribute to the construction and upkeep of a
canal, would bear its costs. This spared older groups,
already drawing water from previous canals, the burdens of
53 Arrington and May, II 'A Different Mode of Life, III
10.
65
new projects. 54
As new canals benefitted certain segments of growing
communities more than others, the 1865 law sanctioned the
creation of residential and farm districts, or sub-communities,
based on canals. The irrigation districts
had great powers of exclusion or inclusion. Their claims
to water had the effect of reserving a certain water
supply for the use of a very specific group of people in a
specific geographic area. In 1875 the Cache County Court
approved an irrigation district set up by a group of
citizens from the towns of Logan, Hyde Park, Smithfield,
and Richmond. The district included
[a]ll the tract of land lying between the base of the
mountains and the Logan and Hyde Park Canal in Logan
Precinct ••• and ••• in Hyde Park Precinct with all that
tract of land known as the New North and South fields
in smithfield Precinct as well as the New South field
in Richmond Precinct •••• 55
The county court had to approve district boundaries and
54 George Thomas, The Development of Institutions
Under Irrigation. with Special Reference to Early
Utah Conditions (New York, 1920), 52.
55 Cache County 'A' Book, 26 April 1875, 262. The
same year, the court approved the Providence and
Millville Irrigation District, south of Logan,
granting it "power to construct dams and to have
controll [sic] of all springs, streams, and rivers
for irrigating purposes located in said district, and
to make canal for the distribution of said waters,
and a further grant of 4/5 of the water running in
the Blacksmiths fork River." Cache County 'A' Book,
1875, 253.
the boards of directors in order to assure community
benefit. The 1865 law, by splitting villages into
districts, encouraged greater decentralization of water
development. It also demanded greater democracy within
the irrigation community, as members had to vote to
approve the district's taxes, policies, and actions. 56
Given the power that the districts were granted over the
66
water within their boundaries, however, irrigators living
outside district boundaries had reduced chances of gaining
full access to water.
The next territory-wide attempt to regulate water use
and development came in 1880, when a new water law removed
the powers of water grants and district supervision from
the county court. In place of the probate judge the
county selectmen became water commissioners, charged with
adjudicating all water claims, and recording those claims
in official county document,s.57 The 1880 law recognized
that much of the water in small community streams had long
ago been claimed and put to use, but that little of it had
been measured, recorded, or in any way legally quantified.
The governmental burden shifted from one of granting water
to one of trying to formalize previous grants and
56 Charles Hillman Brough, Irrigation in utah
(Baltimore, 1895), 36.
57 Wells A. Hutchins and Dallin W. Jensen, The Utah
Law of Water Rights (Salt Lake City, 1965), 12.
67
adjudicate contests over water long-ago committed to
someone's ditch or someone else's mill. This divested the
county court of its authority to grant water according to
the criteria of beneficial use, and left Utahns without a
way to appropriate "new" water. 58
The 1880 water law held sway over Utah irrigators
only until 1897 when statehood brought about yet another
reformulation of policy. In the seventeen years between
1880 and 1897, however, the 1880 measure effected a
revolution in conceptions of water ownership and use, if
not in the actual irrigation practice. The revolution
exhibited a certain schizophrenia. It moved away from,
yet also affirmed, Mormon religious and community ideals.
Water was public property in pioneer Utah, its use
inseparable from the land it watered. Water rights could
not be bought and sold as private property separate from
that land. In 1880 the territorial legislature reversed
those provisions. Thereafter a water right was an
individual's private property, to be bought or sold as
such, without reference to land. 59 The text of the 1880
law read that
such [water] rights may be appurtenant to the land
58 Hutchins and Jensen, The Utah Law of Water Rights,
14.
59 George Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 144.
68
upon which it is used or it may be personal property,
at the option of the rightful owner of such rights
and a change in the place of use of water shall in no
manner affect the validity of any person's right to
use water ..•. 60
This provision did not radically change Utahns use of
water; irrigation practices remained much the same. 61
What changed was the structure of authority into which the
water "owner" entered when disputing a substance that had
now become his private property. Rather than community
groups presenting proposals for water use to probate
judges, individuals now turned to county selectmen, who
settled disputes over individual rights, rather than group
claims. 62
The changes brought on by the 1880 irrigation law had
their roots in the growing conflict between Utah Territory
and the U. S. federal government. Among other attempted
subversions of Mormon regional dominance, the United
states was busy curbing the powers of Utah's county
officials. The growing numbers of non-Mormons in Utah
also challenged Mormon control of water resources. It
seems plausible that the 1880 law was an attempt to assure
60 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 54.
61 Maass and Anderson, ..• and the Desert Shall
Rejoice, 343.
62 Thomas, Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 54.
Mormons continuing control of the water by making water
into private property.63 The law switched the foundation
of water rights from a community basis to an individual
basis, but in doing so it worked toward maintaining the
status quo of community control over water.
69
The second revolution of Utah's 1880 water law, which
confirmed its schizophrenic nature, harked back to pioneer
ideals and water rights whil~ at the same time adjusting
the legal structure to the necessity of continued growth.
The 1880 law confirmed the doctrine of prior
appropriation, the rule of "first in time, first in
right." within the structure of priority rights, though,
the legislature designated two classes of rights--primary
and secondary rights--based on the volume of the river
flow. Those holding primary rights could draw water from
a stream no matter what its level of flow. Holders of
secondary rights drew water only when the river rose above
its lowest average level. M Secondary appropriators were
allowed no water once the river dropped below a certain
level. This provision opened opportunities to post-1880
settlers in areas where earlier diverters had sealed up
the use of available water, but those opportunities lasted
only as long as the excess seasonal flow. The law also
63 Worster, Rivers of Empire, 82.
M Mead, Irrigation Institutions, 228.
70
allowed holders of secondary rights to divert water during
the off-season, when primary rights were not claimed for
summer irrigation. 65 It reduced the ability of on~ group
of water users to block appropriation of excess resources
by others, and thus appeared to serve the growth and
equality of the community within the tradition of Mormon
ideals. M As Arthur Maass and Raymond Anderson commented,
the idea of an absolute priority, such as that applied in
Colorado, was "incompatible" with the Mormon's
"cooperative community approach." In Utah, "the idea of
proportioning limited flows was a natural outgrowth of the
common community interest. The church could not allow
some settlers to have a full supply of water while others
were denied access to it. ,,67 This principle would be
solidly reiterated in the early twentieth century with the
first full legal adjudication of the waters of the Logan
River, which called into question the place of primary and
secondary water rights in the Mormons "cooperative
community approach" to water use.
The territorial water laws of 1865 and 1880 may have
had little actual effect on the means by which the
65 Hutchins and Jensen, Utah Law of water Rights, 36.
M FOX, "Mormon Land System," 140.
67 Maass and Anderson, ••• and the Desert Shall
Rejoice, 347.
71
individual Cache Valley farmer diverted water through his
lateral ditches to his crops, but they provided the over­arching
structure to the smaller patterns and negotiations
that surrounded those diversions. As state power grew,
the Mormon church withdrew from formal involvement in
community water use, but its ideals remained central to
that use. Most importantly, the patterns of community
thinking and behavior that it developed in its members
proved, at least in smaller villages, crucial to the ways
in which they dealt with, and thought about, water. The
structure of water use began as a religious ideal of
cooperation. In becoming a more secular process and in
adjusting itself to state laws such as those of 1865 and
1880, it maintained much of its original cast. The laws,
even when trying to break away from church-created
principles, continued to reflect community values.
When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, the larger
governmental structure continued, with legislation and new
bureaucratic institutions, to assert pressure on local
control over water. In the small towns of Cache Valley,
however, at least through 1920, the attempt to separate
legal order and community order appeared to have little
effect. Local irrigation companies, aided by a continued
abundance of water, simply adapted legal structures to
their own needs. Even when incorporating themselves into
72
new legal entities outside the church, and in using non­church
means to resolve their disputes, water users
remained inherently tied to church-created structures of
thought and action. Those structures included a
fundamental unwillingness to turn to powers outside the
immediate group for financial support, legal advice, or
legal adjudication of conflict. They included as well an
unswerving commitment to the idea that the individual
should contribute to the collective system in proportion
to his benefit from that system. And it included the
conflicts and tension inherent in a system where religious
ideals demanded both individual and community success, and
where each irrigator had to balance his contributions to
the collective with his pursuit of individual advancement.
Water in Mormon Utah flowed flow from the first
nature of the river to the second nature of the canal
systems and the village, the infrastructure that both
defined the community and provided the tapestry against
which Mormons wrestled with their goals and ideals, both
individual and collective. The community did not produce
these CUltural, water-based ideals on its own, however.
Nature played a role. This second nature of canals and
towns, like all such human-constructed second natures, was
rarely free from the vagaries of first nature, from the
unexpected complexities of its own workings, or from the
73
cultural imperatives that brought it into being.
In July of 1890, at the height of the irrigation
season, a mud slide careened down the slope of the raised
alluvial bench at the mouth of the canyon, filled in the
Logan and Richmond canal, and tore a 200 foot break in the
canal's bank. with over 200 city lots and about 2,600
acres of farmland thirsting for their due, the landholders
of the Logan and Richmond irrigation district spent a dry
three weeks repairing the damage and building a wooden
flume so that water could again reach their yards and
crops. They then spent a year wrangling with officials of
Utah state Agricultural College, a two-year-old
institution whose application of irrigation water to
farmland on top of the bench, just above the canal,
softened the soil along the sidehill, and caused the mud
slides.
In early July of 1891, a year later, it happened
again. At an emergency meeting on July 11th, district
stockholders debated their next move. James Adams, who
owned 14 acres of farmland and one city lot in the Logan
precinct of the irrigation district, declared to the
assembled group that "the reason we are here is that the
canal is broke and we want to know if all are willing to
go to work and fix it, alIso [sic] what are we going to do
with the College for destroying our Canal.,,68 The
struggle between the Logan and Richmond district and the
Agricultural College, which continued, as did the mud
slides, into the twentieth century. It provides a
microcosm of the first set of connections important to
74
water use in Mormon communities: the flow of water out of
its natural water courses and into community-managed
canals, and the conflicts over management of and
responsibility for those canals. Here, first nature--the
rich, porous soils of that land formation--impinged on the
second nature of the canal system and the farms it served,
as, for example, when two sets of irrigators attempted
simultaneous July waterings of land on top of the bench
and below the canal.
This particular conflict also emphasized some
important features of the canal systems: their generally
unplanned nature, at least in relation to each other;
their technological simplicity; their low level of
capitalization. The stories of the Logan and Richmond
Canal, and the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield Canal, the
two major irrigation thoroughfares that I will examine
here, illustrate the flow of water through Mormon
68 Minutes, 11 July 1891, Logan 'and Richmond
Irrigation Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 1,
Bound MS 28, Utah state University Library, Logan, UT
[hereafter Logan and Richmond I], 414.
75
communities, beginning with the initial flow from a
"natural" structure into a community structure, from first
to second nature.
76
CHAPTER IV
GETTING WATER: COMMUNITY SYSTEMS OF EXCHANGE
The struggle within and among Mormon communities to
harness water for shared and individual purposes took
place not on the level of territorial water law (though
these laws certainly played a role), but on the level of
day-to-day and season-to-season water use. The tensions
rooted in the struggle to put water to God's purpose grew
out of the mundane, and often muddled proces's of
appropriating, measuring, distributing, paying for, and
controlling water. Through these processes, irrigators
measured their share of the community resource, and
defined their individual contributions to the upkeep of
the ditches. At its core, irrigation was a system of
exchange between the individual and the community. Canal
companies, representing the water community, based the
rate of exchange on a direct proportion. Everyone gave to
the system in proportion to the amount of water they
needed. The simplicity of that system was confounded,
though, by the patriarchal nature of the society which
gave small groups of leaders greater power over community­regulated
resources, and by every individual's struggle to
better his family's condition within the community. The
77
ideal of the system was complicated as well by the ill­defined,
always-changing exchanges themselves, and by
nature itself. water flowed downhill, from one geographic
point to another, and thus different water users,
upstream, and downstream, no matter how democratic their
intentions, bore unequal relationships to one another, and
to the canal.
The conflicts that arose out of these exchanges
between individual and community prove that Mormons did
fight over water. Less obvious, however, and more subtly
apparent in' the inner workings of Logan River canal
collectives, were the ways and the reasons that they
fought over water, and the routes they took in surmounting
the barriers raised by those conflicts. The need to
manage water kept the problems of community purpose and
individual salvation at the center of daily life. Water,
for this reason and others, took on powers and meanings
well beyond its salutary effects on agricultural
production. The resolution of water conflicts continued,
into the twentieth century, to reflect the insularity and
~ solidarity of early Mormon villages.
Although the 1880 water law made it possible to re­define
a water right as a piece of private property rather
than as a community-granted, church-granted, or God­granted
usufruct, Cache Valley irrigators in the last two
78
decades of the 19th century defined and dealt with water
in very practical, non-legislative ways. The community
used water in myriad ways, to power mills, water stock,
cook, clean, and, eventually, generate electricity. The
pre-eminent use of canal water, however, was irrigation of ~
food crops. The process by which water was channeled to
crops, rather than legal definitions of water right,
dominated collective understanding of how water should be
measured and distributed. The result of this agricultural
mindset was a fluidity of exchange in which irrigators
traded labor, grain, and cash for water according to
mutually agreed-upon rates of exchange. The leadership of
the Logan and Richmond Irrigation District, for instance,
spent much of its time administering these various
arrangements, recording the amount of labor and cash that
each member contributed to the collective, and attempting
to regulate the amount of water taken in return. The
landowners under the canal met annually to vote on
standards of eXChange, to set wage rates, yearly tax
assessments, and haggle over the worth of everyone's work
and water. Not everyone in the community was required to
contribute labor, cash, or crops, however. widows and men
in "poor circumstances" were provided with water tax-free
by the community, a practice which underscored the extent
to which the irrigation district was a ' community, rather
79
than commercial institution. 1
In March 1879 Robert and James Meikle of Smithfield,
who were not at the time landholders in the Logan and
Richmond Irrigation District, but would by 1884 own 28
acres between them, petitioned the district trustees for
use of water from the canal based on labor they had done
on the canal in 1865, 1866, and 1867, over ten years
earlier. The trustees figured out that the Meikles labor
had been worth $133, which entitled them to enough water
for six and a half acres of land. 2 Thus labor on a canal,
even if accomplished long ago, remained the key means of
access to water, the immediate fruit of that labor.
Robert and James Meikle may not have needed water from the
Logan and Richmond Canal in 1865, but when they did need
it later, their labor guaranteed them that right.
Although different methods of measuring irrigation water
sprang up everywhere as more and more claimants and
regulators sought to divide river flows, here the volume
of water remained, for the time being, measurable only by
1 Log~n and Richmond I, 5 March 1881, 87.
2 Logan and Richmond I, 8 March 1879. water taxes and
acreages cited, and calculations of average payments
and number of acres owned, are derived from Logan and
Richmond accounts for the years 1879 and 1884, found
in the first volume of records, pp. 4-24, 188-215,
and the years 1891 and 1896, found in the second
volume of Logan and Richmond records, pp. 2-20, 172-
93.
the area of the fields it could irrigate. The "water of
six and a half acres," was clearly measured in terms of
agricultural land.
80
In 1879, then, the Logan and Richmond landholders
thought of water in terms of their fields, and in terms of
the crops those fields produced. In October of that year
the annual stockholders meeting bogged down in a debate
over the price to be accorded a bushel of grain in the
paying of annual water assessments. The water taxes were
set at 10 cents per acre of agricultural land, and 20
cents per city lot. After "considerable discussion" the
group agreed on a price of 75 cents for a bushel of wheat,
in the paying of water assessments. 3 A landholder with
one city lot and 20 acres of land, owing $2.20 to the
district for the year, could pay in cash, in labor, or in
grain--just under three bushels. Water users paid water
assessments based not on the actual volume of water they
used, but on the amount of land and the kind of land they
watered. Water was not really taxable apart from its use
for irrigation; it was part and parcel of the way in which
it was put to use. When irrigators looked at and thought
of water they saw water, certainly, but they also saw
their own labor, their investment in the land and the
community, and they saw grain. with assessments paid in
3 Logan and Richmond I, 13 October 1879, 33.
81
grain, the exchange came full circle. The product of the
water itself--the crops--could pay for the water. Any
system of exchange, however, that attempted to balance
water on one hand, and land, labor, and grain on the
other, all of which had different values in different
seasons and years, generated its share of confusion.
Questions of how to measure and distribute water came
up again and again in the 1880s and 1890s. For Robert and
James Meikle, the Logan and Richmond district trustees
measured water according to acres of land. How much water
that actually involved was never specified, but rather
regulated by the farmers and watermasters, according to
commonly held conceptions of hoW much water was needed for
each acre of crops. The standard unit of distribution was
the "irrigating stream," a somewhat vague volume
considered to be the largest free flowing stream of water
that a single irrigator (with a shovel) could distribute
over his crops.4 In June of 1882, Smithfield's
watermaster complained that Hyde Park, whose irrigators
got water before it got to Smithfield, were cutting
through the canal banks and taking more than their share.
The trustees discussed the issue and, in an attempt to
even out the distribution of water, "ordered that the
4 Thomas, The Development of Institutions Under
Irrigation, 109.
82
water be divided so as to give each one hundred acres a
stream all through the district. tls Presumably, this water
would be distributed on a set schedule, everyone or two
weeks. This attempt to match specific volumes of water
with specific acreages indicated that such co-ordination
required special effort, and that the irrigators'
conception of equal distribution was based in the idea
that a given amount of water was best measured by the
amount of land it irrigated. The Logan and Richmond
district account books kept records of water use according
to the number of acres and number of city lots each
subscriber watered, and assessed water taxes accordingly.
Actual volumes of water rarely entered into the
proceedings. This agriculturally-based system of
measurement would change, however.
In October of 1879., Thomas X. Smith, the Logan city
Watermaster, and a local ward bishop, approached the Logan
and Richmond Irrigation District on behalf of Logan City
with a request for a grant of year-round water rights to
one square foot of the canal's water, a specific volume
equivalent to 100 acres of water right. The agreement
that followed signaled a slight shift in the
inseparability of water and land. In its contract with
Logan City, the irrigation district required the city to
S Logan and Richmond I, 24 June 1882, 118-19.
83
pay taxes on 100 acres of water right, even though Logan
city was not watering 100 acres of land but rather
supplying its residents with water for various other
purposes. This deal also signaled a geographic division
between water users that changed community relationships.
The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District was taking form
as an entity separate from the town of Logan itself. The
Logan and Richmond canal flowed only through part of
Logan, and then out of Logan, to serve other communities.
The community of Logan residents and the community of
irrigators along the Logan and Richmond Canal emerged as
distinct factions with distinct interests and distinct
ways of using the same water source. Growing demands for
water thus complicated the accepted systems of exchange
for water, and increased the chances for conflict.
The intricate details of neighborly water-sharing
realm, whether between individuals or villages, required a
constant hammering out, as irrigators sought fair
solutions to the dilemmas posed by clashes between the
river itself and the uses to which they put it. In
December of 1896 members of the Smithfield Precinct
challenged a district by-law that directed Hyde Park water
users to pay an additional ten percent on their annual
taxes, and smithfield water users an additional twenty
percent. Proponents of the extra tax held that the canal
84
had longer to travel to supply water to the towns farther
north, and thus those towns should contribute a greater
proportion to the canal's upkeep. This challenged the
cherished system of directly proportionate water exchange.
By May of 1899 James Cantwell, long-time representative of
smithfield water users, reported that his village planned
a lawsuit to challenge the 20% "local expenses" tax. 6 The
suit materialized the following December, with Smithfield
claiming that the by-laws, along with the extra local
taxes, had been drafted by the wrong party. The towns
came to an out-of-court agreement however, and the
trustees agreed to draft a new set of by-laws, eliminating
the offensive taxes. 7
Despite the seeming prevalence of inter-town water
disputes, the majority of conflicts described in
irrigation district account books, and in the literature
of local water history, demonstrate that much of the
tension involved in district administration arose from
struggles over the individual water users responsibilities
to the collective infrastructure, and the various canal
companies' . contributions and responsibilities to its
6 Minutes, 16 May 1899, Logan and Richmond Irrigation
Company Minutes and Account Book, vol. 2, Bound MS
29, Utah state University Library, Logan Utah
[hereafter Logan and Richmond II], 277; Logan and
Richmond II, 25 February 1899, 272-73.
7 Logan and Richmond II, 4 December 1899, 286.
85
individual members. In 1887 a legal conflict arose
concerning the Logan Irrigation District, the district
surrounding the Logan and Benson Canal, built in 1860.
Farmers in the tiny outlying village of Benson had dug an
extension to the original canal to serve their fields.
The trustees of the Logan Irrigation District took no
responsibility for the canal extension or the distribution
of water from it.
By 1887 the Benson irrigators found themselves deeply
frustrated by internal battles over individual water
rights. In 1898 they sued to force the Logan Irrigation
District to acknowledge the Benson extension as part of
their canal and take over its administration. 8 In doing
so, they turned to a higher, but wholly community based,
collective power to mediate individual conflicts, a common
pattern in Mormon village life. The local court denied
this request, asserting that the Benson farmers
"constructed the Benson extension to the canal without any
suggestion or aid from the Logan farmers, while the Logan
section was constructed by all in common. ,,9 This followed
8 George L. Swendsen, "Appropriation of water from
Logan River," in Elwood Mead, Report of Irrigation
Investigations in Utah, U. S. Department of
Agriculture Office of Experiment stations Bulletin
No. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 312.
9 Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan
River," 312.
86
the Mormon community rationale that the labor involved in
canal construction or maintenance was the only true tie to
that canal, and the only tie that carried rights to and
obligations toward use of that canal. The state supreme
court, however, overturned the local decision, stating
that the trustees of an irrigation district cannot
arbitrarily set limits on its services within the
geographic boundaries of the district. tO within the area
designated as a water community, the community was
obligated to meet the needs of all of its members, at
least to a certain point.
These issues of individual and community obligations
arose at different times in different forms. Since
members of each precinct had shared certain interests,
petitions to the trustees often took the form of
collective demands. At the annual landowners meeting of
December 1894, William Hyde of Hyde Park suggested that
the votes to elect the board be cast by precinct. James
Adams of Logan countered with a move to give each
landowner one vote. Rasmus Nielsen pointed out that
according to law, they were bound to vote according to
acreage watered under the canal, and the group agreed to
to Swendsen, "Appropriation of Water from Logan
River," 312.
87
do SO.l1 This debate concerning how each individual was
to represent himself within the group, how he measured his
power in collective decision making, demonstrated, to some
degree, the basic hierarchy at work. The individual water
user was not to be considered merely a member of his
irrigation precinct, nor as a voter equal to all other
voters in the district. The village, or community, was
not considered capable of representing each individual's
interest, nor was each individual's interest considered
equal. The established practice of voting by acreage gave
each water user power over group decisions according to
his degree of interest, the amount of land he had to water
with the resources controlled by the group. This affirmed
the tradition of the individual/community exchange
governed by direct proportion.
The Logan and Richmond Irrigation District's
traditional system of exchange for water was complicated
in the 1890s by the possibility of re-constituting the
canal as a corporate stock company. The struggle to come
to a communal decision to incorporate the irrigation
district began in 1882, and waxed and waned for many
years. It came to a head at several points, including the
winter of 1894-95. At that time, out of concern to place
the organization on firm legal ground, and follow the
11 Logan and Richmond II, 3 December 1894, 123.
88
letter of the law, the landowners voted to incorporate.
This decision was followed however, by a long debate over
the method by which to distribute stock in the new
corporation, whether by "Dollars and cents expended on the
Canal" or "according to waterright pre Acreage as shown on
the Books of the Company. ,,12 Though the argument that
followed ended as the majority of attenders wandered out
of the meeting, it demonstrated that the question of what
gave the individual water user rights to interest in the
company--his individual contributions in labor and cash,
or the amount of land he needed watered--remained an
issue.
A year later, in January of 1895, the landowners
abandoned the idea of a stock company and unanimously
voted to maintain their current status, to legally
organize themselves as an irrigation district. 13 In the
final decision they rejected the sUbstitution of an
exchange system based on financial stock in favor of their
traditional system of taxes and communal labor. The re­casting
of water rights as shares in a corporation would
have constituted a further abstraction of a natural
entity--water--into a financial entity. That the Logan
and Richmond District turned away from that abstraction
12 Logan and Richmond II, 4 January 1895, 125.
13 Logan and Richmond II, 11 January 1895, 126.
89
pointed to their favoring of the more concrete, hands-on,
local administration provided by the irrigation district.
It underlined as well the cultural importance of these
exchanges based on labor and land.
similar debates and conflicts over water use plagued
the water users under the Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield
Canal, the third and highest of the Logan canals running
north from the canyon. The Logan, Hyde Park, and
smithfield began as a private, for-profit enterprise. The
challenges of diverting water from the river in the canyon
itself and running it through a canal carved in a ledge in
the canyon wall proved too much for the initial investors.
In the early 1880s a community organization took over,
completed construction, and began operations as an
incorporated cooperative irrigation company by the end of
the decade.
The articles of incorporation of the Logan, Hyde
Park, and smithfield declared a capital stock of $20,000,
consisting of 4000 shares sold at $5 each. The initial
subscribers were required to pay for only 10% of their
stock in order to have the corporation acknowledged by the
county court, which retained authority over canal
incorporation. Cash played a larger role as the arbiter
of water use, but initially it remained secondary to the
standard currencies of canal finance--Iabor, crops, and
90
water. In the first year of operation, the canal
directors granted credits in corporate stock to irrigators
who had worked to complete the construction. Thus
stockholders gained further shares through their labor and
non-stockholders earned water rights in the traditional
Mormon way, by helping to finish and repair the ditch.
Laborers were often paid half of their wages in cash and
half in stock. w
Despite the new language of shares and stock, the
Logan, Hyde Park, and smithfield remained a small, local
operation. The trustees, or board of directors, reported
the net worth of the company in February 1891 as
consisting of 40 acres of land, .a cooking stove, four and
a half barrels of cement, a tent, some tools, and a dump
cart. The total cash value of these items amounted to
just over $500.15 The inflow of tax money and .outflow of
cash for materials and labor left the corporation with
little in the way of liquid capital. Though the canal
itself was worth about $14,000, wealth in and of itself
14 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield Canal Company
Minutes and Account Book, Bound MS 26, Utah State
University Library, Logan, UT [hereafter Logan, Hyde
Park, and Smithfield], 10 February 1890, 1 March
1890, 15 March 1890, 39-45.
15 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 21 February
1891, 73.
was neither a corporate goal, nor a reality.~
stockholders voted their shares in company business, and
paid for their water at a lower rate than non­shareholders.
In 1890 shareholders paid 12 1/2 cents an
91
acre to water farm land, and $1.00 for city lots, compared
to the 40 cents per acre and $1.50 per city lot paid by
non-shareholders. Shareholders, of course, held first
rights to available water.
Though the owning of stock distinguished members from
non-members, and thus served as a criteria for full
participation in this particular water community, all
irrigators paid water taxes according to acres and lots
watered. The old standards of exchange remained very much
in evidence. The need for and use of water was based on
land and crops, as usual, and not on corporate status.
The advent of corporate stock, a measure of water-community
membership and, indeed of water, however, was
new to irrigators, and required some adjustment. Shares
in the corporation could be earned, bought, and sold with
no reference to the land or the water they represented.
For the first few years, shareholders wavered over
what in fact distinguished them from other water users-­those
with more stock, those with less, and those with
16 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 23 February
1891, 75.
92
none. Board President Hyrum Maughan raised this issue to
the presiding group in March 1892. -He "suggested the
propriety of having some relation established between the
shares held and the water used by stockholders ..•. ,,17
Maughan felt that they should review the records and find
the total amount expended on "cleaning, repairing, and
enlarging the canal from the beginning of the present
ownership .... ,,18 After figuring as well the amount that
water users had paid in taxes, they could ascertain who
was using less or more than their share. A similar
question arose the next week, when a shareholder asked
that some standard be set for "how much waterrright was
required to water an acre of land or rather how much stock
it was necessary to hold to water one acre."~ Irrigator
Marrinus Anderson added that "I think that if we knew how
much water right was required for 5 or 10 acres use [we]
could govern ourselves accordingly."w The measure of,
and relationships among, land, water, time, and corporate
stock remained mysterious and confused. Anderson added
17 Logan, Hyde Park, and Smithfield, 8 March 1892,